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Originally Posted by pdurrant
It seems that easy alignment of text elements within the page is another thing sadly lacking in the ePub 2 and 3 specifications.
In CSS/CSS2, I suppose the question is how to get access to a measurement of the width of the initial capital in some way, so that it can be centred on the 50% page width.
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Jeeeze, people. (That's not directed to/at you, Grand Mouse). It's easy to do precise vertical and horizontal placement in print....because it won't change. Layout programs like InDesign can do whatever the hell they want, because the only end result is print--where the end result is what's seen, not what WORKS. You can sit there and position something using tabs, spaces, leading, kerning, etc. all of which mimic what--human placement. In Indd, you can sit there and manually "nudge" a line, a letter, an image, etc., up or down by infinitesimal increments, mimicking the human eye/hand.
And yes, you can place them using precise x/y coordinates, as well.
And we have NONE of these things, in reflowable ePUB/MOBI. (I mention MOBI only because others here have mentioned it, not b/c the OP has mentioned it.) We don't have x/y coordinate placement, not unless we have the digital equivalent of print--fixed-layout. We don't have tabs. For all intents and purposes, we don't have spaces, not really. We don't have kerning, and leading is at best, remarkably primitive.
So...how, exactly, would we all propose to achieve the centered placement of a single letter, which would change, depending upon which letter it is that's being used? Without the ability to calculate the width of the individual letter, and the size it's being displayed at, on the fly, and then calculate the remainder of the line...well.
(Note to the OP: have you considered using a BFL, instead? Yes, yes, I realize that you are determined to emulate the original print layout, from nearly 30 years ago, but, hear me out. If you used a monospace BFL, for your Raised Initial, it would ALWAYS be the same size, and thus, you could get relatively decent results doing that.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
But the question is, can this be done in ePub, not whether it's a good idea. 
I'm all for people trying designs and asking whether it can be done. It helps to show either that the ePub spec is good for a wide variety of ebook design, or that it is not. |
Yes, yes. Of course. Although the one with the letter centered beneath the image...that's hopeless unless it's done in FXL. You just don't have the same mechanisms for sizing images and text, and synching them...nyet.
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Personally, I think it's vastly over complicated for 90% of books. And that the complications don't actually help very much with complex page layout, as HTML/CSS wasn't designed from the point of view of high quality typography/page layout.
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It is very complicated, even for print, really. I can almost close my eyes and envision the person who did that original layout. I won't say what that person was probably like, but...the point of print layout is not to distract from the book. It's not to show off, saying "look what I did!" It's to do one thing, and one thing only--to enhance and perfect the reading experience. OF THE BOOK, not of the incipits or the chapter head, etc. The perfect line-length and character count for that line is
far more important than a drop cap, or incipits.
I see the ignoring of that, all the time, in print books made at CS, IS, etc.--POD DIY books. You'll see 80-char long lines, or 50, etc. Things that make the reading experience harder on the reader, because the person who did the layout isn't trained.
Sorry--I don't mean to digress; we're talking eBooks, not print. But the principals are the same. And believe me, we (at my biz) do a lot of frippery, too. We try VERY hard to emulate print, as closely as we can, too. I'm not dissing the OP.
But you can't compare the realities of one to the other. They're not remotely the same. And when you think about the computing power that would be needed, to do even this one small thing--calculate the width of a given letter, on the fly, then do this, then that--you'd be adding size/weight to the eReader.
I will say this--if I were going to do this book, with the same goal--I'd consider looking at the coding from a slightly different view. Do we know the widths of all the letters, of each of the letters, at any given size? Can CSS be written for each? For a website, you could use "transform," and then make each of the RI the same size--that would solve some of the issue. But transform is not supported, typically...so that dog don't hunt.
Or, maybe...letter-spacing. If you set it to xpx, just for this, perhaps that would do it.
I'd think about approaching it from the "manage the letter," not manage the coding standpoint, due to the limitations of the coding that we have available to us for eBooks.
Anyway....that's what I'd do. If I undertook it. (Which, fortunately, I didn't, {smile})
Hitch