[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Natch, formatting genius that I am. (HA!!!)

Yes, you are good and know a lot of the gotchas when it comes to having to try to please people while trying not to bow-down to silly requests.

I wonder what some of your clients would say if I took their eBook and formatted it the way I like without all of this farting about and silly formatting.

Have you seen some of the eBooks I've posted on MR?

Well, in this, you're basically saying, format the book as-best-possible for those who can't/won't/don't-know-how? Personally, I do not care for spacing between paragraphs, all things being equal. However, there are some devices that can make it a bit tricky to see the start/end of paragraphs, and for those, obviously, that nudge of space helps the reader understand, "this is a new paragraph."

In typography of the old-school, you set your indents to be harmonious. For example, if your page is set to a 12/14 (12pt font in a 14 point line-height or lead), then traditionally, you set your indent to 1em (the font size) or 1 lead (14pt sized). To do that in an eBook, you'd realistically set that to 1.2ems (for the one lead sizing). Most folks in the eBook world--or, I should say, most professionals, as far as I know--use one em. I don't think I've seen very many one-lead indents, but it's possible.

But on some devices, the indents and line-spacing (line-height) can be overriden. Margins, not so much. So, let's say that you did use a 12/14; you did use a one-lead ident, but Moon Reader or what-have-you overrides it. How does the reader more easily "see" the new paragraph, if the indents have disappeared or, rather, all-but-disappeared? That extra nudge of space helps. That's one of the reasons that in very, very text-heavy books that we do, with very long paragraphs, you'll see us put in a very small additional amount of space, between them. The Kindles typically don't mess up the formatting that much, but you'd be amazed at what one person with Kindle for PC can DO to your book.

Otherwise, I actually do agree with most--no spacing between paragraphs, it can be a blight, and I certainly don't hold with a full line (or even a half-line) between first-line-indent paras.

I do like a 1.2em indent. I find that works quite well and it not too small or too big. I've seen as bad as 5% for an indent. That looks really bad. I've noticed that Simon & Schuster use a 1.2em indent. I have seem 1.5em used and that's not too bad.

As for the paragraph spaces, I prefer not to have them. Even a .3em parargraph space is annoying.

Thing is, programs like Moon Reader that basically override mot things, if the paragraph indent is set to off, then that's a user error and one that is easily fixed by just changing the setting. So if that's the reason for paragraph spaces, then I would not put them in. There are some programs such as Marvin that can set paragraph spaces. But ADE cannot do this. ADE (the most used program for reading ePub) cannot do a lot of things so that has to be taken into account. What I really dislike a lot are program for reading ePub that override just about everything and never once fully respect the CSS. It's find to have the overrides, but if the overrides are set to off, then that should mean to respect the CSS. And some programs have no clue what they are doing when they override indents. AN indent of 0 has a meaning and should be respected when there are indents.

You're talking about a couple of different things here. You're talking about the size of the chapter heads, and the margins. PLUS, don't forget, if you're talking about a formatter that's matching a print book, the choice may be out of her hands. I mean, I've certainly dealt with this, repeatedly. What looks awesome in print is desired for the companion ebook, and I can't really blame them for that. I can't really speak to some one-size-fits-all rule, here, Jon. I don't think that's realistic, for "all" books.

If someone has a big print chapter head, we'll try to emulate it in an eBook, at an appropriate size and distance from the margins. We tell our clients that we "channel" the look and feel, not match it EXACTLY.

We deal with this all the damn time, with clients that insist that their eBook "heading" has to be 48pts, or whatever, just like their print book, and I show them WHY that's a terrible idea. I can usually talk them out of it, but NOT always. I've been required to slap something in there like that. When they won't defer to my judgement, I'll tell them that we'll do it, but I put in a proviso that if the book comes back from Amazon with a KQN, or a reader complaint, etc., we won't fix it for free. Just like I'll turn down fixed-layout for any book that doesn't absolutely need it, just because the client doesn't understand eBooks. Won't do it.

I know what I like is not what everyone would like and I get that. But the silly space used is just silly. I was cleaning up the formatting of an eBook yesterday and the top margin for the paragraph title was 20%.

Here is the CSS code for the chapter title in another eBook that's just bad form. There's too much in it then there needs to be and 10em looks awful as a top margin.

.cn {
  display: block;
  font-size: 1.55em;
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-family: serif;
  text-align: left;
  margin-top: 10em;
  margin-bottom: 2em;
  margin-left: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  text-indent: 0;
}

This is this how I would do it for the same class. If it was for my personal use, I would go 0.8em for the top/bottom margin. I got that for some eBook and decided it looked good. When the font size it large enough, I'll use 0.5em.

.cn {
  font-size: 1.55em;
  font-weight: bold;
  margin-top: 1em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}

[quoteB]ecause they a) don't know how or b) think that BQ formatting doesn't work in MOBI, usually. I also loathe it, but...Jon, if you didn't see under their skirts, would you really object? Typically, you only know that they're there because you CAN, not because it's obvious. [/quote]

But I've seen some pretty poor fake BQ formatting. A real BQ would have not had such bad formatting.

I've seen formatting with left/right margins at 5%. Or with no right margin. That's just going to look awful in both cases. The default values for a BQ would have worked much better.

Right, and some people want them on, because they think that X being separated from Y is somehow "more important" or "more typographically correct" than not having it on, or squaring the page, or, or or. The fact that squaring the page is impossible, at this point in the technology, seems to be an argument that's routinely ignored. Or they argue that it "should" be easy, to do al this in ebooks, simply because they don't have the faintest understanding of what has to be calculated to do all that. OR, what a typesetter really goes through, hand-in-hand with the book's editor, to make those pages square, and those headings not separate from the body content, and so on and so on and so on.

I think that some folks think that their ideas about what's "right" or "wrong" in typesetting are real, when oftentimes, they're not. I've had more than a few instances of this. Had one client that had a COW about alleged stub-ends. She thought that any single word, at the end of a paragraph, was this horrible typographic faux-pas, and that we--the typesetters--had to
manually kern her entire paragraph, to make it fit. Uh, NOPE. Yes, stubs under 3 letters are considered "messy," and post-hyphenation stubs are considered to be a typographic mistake, but a word like "there" isn't.

Or the client that went through her book, and sent us something like 600 edits--all removing the word "I" from the last spot in any given line. Some idiot had told her that lines in a book--I mean, the end of any given line, inside a paragraph--couldn't end with "I" as in:

What I might do is turn off widow and orphans and then let the client have a look and see what he/she thinks. I would not say what I did. If that person then said he/she didn't like then it would be a matter of going from there. But at least you'd have the version with no windows/orphans and all you can say is which do you like better as these are your two choices.

As for the person who wanted the I removed, I would have shown that person a few paragraphs with the I at the end of a line and changed the font size so that wasn't there.

It's like anything else--typesetting is beset with urban myths, or whatever you want to call them, other than misconceptions, about what's right and wrong. For example, Orphans (when the first line of a paragraph starts at the bottom of a page) aren't actually wrong. There's no reason to turn yourself inside out, to move that to the next page. That's an idea borne by Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Word. Not typographers. But, it's taken hold, and now I get to deal with scores of authors who both want their pages squared--and no widows or orphans, either. Well, I hate to tell ya, but that's a lotta lotta "tweaky" time. It's one thing to set INDD to not have widows--it's another to do that AND square the pages.

I'm of the show them the correct way to do things and see what they think before showing them what they want. Because if you do it the correct way, the code will be neat enough to then attempt to do it their way. And you can then show a comparison of the two and point out why their way doesn't work.

Anyway, you wanted my opinions, and, oh lucky you, now you have them. :-)

Hitch

I did want and thank you for giving.