Quote:
Originally Posted by Nabodita
Thanks Turtle91. Will play around with this and test it out tonight.
I also like the idea of a transparent png... do android reading apps mean ADE?
Out of curiousity, is iBooks ignoring the empty div or the height property? I've still been fiddling with it and it looks like its the height that's being ignored.
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Android reading apps mean whatever the developer wants as far as I can tell. It's a situation wherein ePub might be a standard, but all you can generally count on is that an Android reader app will open an epub and the text will be readable if it's valid.
Whether your CSS will be honored depends on the app. How images get treated depends on the app. Some will let you tap to zoom, some won't.
FWIW, things I've found:
A lot of Android reader apps don't like too large of an image. Many will give you a blank page if an image goes much over 2200 pixels high/1500 pixels wide. This is annoying when one owns a 10" tablet with 300 dpi resolution, since covers or other full page images will look a little softer. Reasonably acceptable, but not ideal. There's no error message to let you know an image didn't load, just a blank page to mystify the reader.
I used to think I was doing something wrong, but I saw someone else on MR mention the same problem.
About half of the apps I've tested on don't seem to care for a transparent PNG in an SVG wrapper, giving a blank white page again, or in the case of the Overdrive app, a solid black rectangle. Non-transparent images seem to work fine in SVG wrappers though. But a tablet or phone is exactly where you want transparency most, sigh.
SVG images are generally supported OK, and transparency works. I've had no issues with using SVG for title pages. Use title and desc tags, those are generally honored when an SVG image won't display. However, bitmap tracing a complex drawing can result in a larger file size of the SVG than a PNG would give you. I created an SVG yesterday where the size was 1.83 MB vs 401 KB for a transparent PNG at full resolution. This created a slight lag for image loading on a fast tablet (Pixel C). The loading lag time for the same image on my e-ink Kobo was just entirely unacceptable!
CSS support in Android apps is somewhat variable. Best at rendering my books as they appear in ADE are Bookari, Pocketbook and Bluefire Reader. These however, are amongst those that the image issues I mentioned can be found in.
One more infuriating issue, a few Android reading apps don't play well with 4:3 aspect ratio tablets. Gitden Reader and Lithium will cut off the bottoms of images on the aforesaid tablets and display that cut bit on the next page. The identical ebook file will display absolutely fine on a narrower phone screen with no image cut off. Overdrive and Google Play Books are sometimes guilty of the image cut off behavior on 4:3 tablets as well, though to a lesser extent.
Android reading apps I've played with so far:
Aldiko
Bluefire
Bookari
Cool Reader
FB Reader
Gitden Reader
Google Play Books
Lithium
Kobo
Moon+ Reader
Nook
Overdrive
Pocketbook
UB Reader
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