Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
I’m curious about this ‘widows and orphans’ issue. About 99% of my ebook reading is on Kindle platform. Even with so-called Enhanced Typography, I still see this happening with some frequency. I don’t like it, especially when sub-titles show up at the bottom of a page, or captions that wind up on a different page than the image or figure they describe. Continuous Scrolling is a sort of workaround to this, but it does not work on Kindles, and Amazon has not really finished implementation of it (no Immersion Reading, no Speak Screen, no equivalent of Page View or even a scroller to help with navigation).
Am I to blame Amazon, lazy publishers who don’t care what their product looks like, or myself for being too sensitive?
Does KFX/KF8 even support ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ properties? (I can find no mention in Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines 2019.1)
I fired up Bookari for iOS and downloaded a Feedbooks edition of Sherlock Holmes. It uses both Adobe RMSDK and Readium SDK (I think the latter for whatever EPUB 3 stuff is supported). I don’t see a single orphan or widow (granted this is a sample of 1 and has very simple formatting). I don’t know if this is because Feedbooks use of CSS or an implementation decision of the rendering engine. And yes, bottom margin varies from page to page, leaving me wonder if I’ve completed a chapter section, or if it is just the result of avoiding orphans and widows on relatively small (compared to print) page size. But I still think it is ‘better’.
I fired up Apple Books and opened up one of those ‘Idiot’s Guide’ books, which has more complicated formatting. Indeed, it has what I consider one of the more egregious variants of Orphaning: a section header that appears at the bottom of the page, separated from the body text that follows on the next page. Simply intolerable, I say! But is there CSS property that tells the section header to move to start of next page to stick with the paragraph following?
In any case, it seems, I must continue to tolerate some non-zero level of what I judge to be bad typography, or give up reading ebooks. I don’t understand what is so hard about this. Can’t rendering engine apply some heuristics, at least where there’s ample processing power? Do we have to wait for machine learning to find its way to reading platforms?
I don’t want more Settings in the reading platform, I have no time to play with CSS. I just want it to look better.
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Question, before I endeavor to respond to this--do you write any code at all, or markup? HTML? Anything like that?
Hitch