Thread: Problem adding extra lines in text
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Old 07-03-2020, 11:40 PM   #20
Hitch
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Originally Posted by Turtle91 View Post
I think you mentioned that you also don't indent the first paragraph after a section break. I think that's a good idea as well. That tells the user/reader that something is different without having to lose space at the top of a new page.

You can even add special stuff if you are so inclined to make it even more obvious...like a Large(r) first letter, or something. I've seen lots of examples where the author /publisher can get that artistic flare while still keeping the css relatively simple.
We always (unless overridden by the client--I sometimes wonder if any of them have seen a damn book!--you know how many times we get proof forms telling us we made a 'mistake' by not-indenting paragraphs at the beginning of a new chapter or after a scene break?) make our post-scene-break paragraphs block-style for that reason.

I like fleurons; but we get a lot of customers that have a crapload of new scenes and that starts to get to be an eyesore if you routinely have 1-2 fleurons on every page/screen. We did a book recently in which, for the print version, we had 3 fleurons/page, on average. It made my damn eyes hurt to look at it. For a book like that--an eBook--honestly, I don't see a choice if you really want the reader to know where a screen break occurs.

Especially now that (yes, yes, I know this is the ePUB forum, but...) MOBI is doing that keep-together cruft. You get LOTS of extra space at the bottom of pages and it's horribly distracting. I constantly think that I'm at the end of a scene, or the end of a chapter, and WRONG, I'm not. It's annoying as hell.

SO, gang, as much as my inner bookmaker likes the space-only scenebreak...you simply can't only do that if the file is going to be ePUB-ified or MOBI-fied. Remember our jobs--as bookmakers--to not get between the story and the reader, right? To make the content readable and enjoyable or at least, understandable, yes? So...like it or not, asterisms, or fleurons or a signal flare, something, is needed on digital devices.

And using 2em padding--to my way of thinking, it causes the same issues as the MOBI keep-together crap. I like it, in a pure way, but in a practical way...well, see Dion's examples.

IMHO, of course.

Hitch
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