Quote:
Originally Posted by AoiHana
Hi.
I'm rather new to ebook edition... and discovered it was hell on Earth just to have a simple picture layout on Kindles...
I want pictures on the left, with a paragraph on the right, like this: 
Were I enlarge characters, the paragraph would reflow seemlessly while the picture stays fixed. I did it, I know it's possible, the problem is the result is not reproductible or consistent from picture to picture, like, not at all.
I'm on Libreoffice writer. I think it worked while anchoring was "on paragraph", and I converted the whole to... I don't remember. mobi or azw or azw3. Shit  .
How do you lot do ? If kindle can manage to do it once, there should a reliable way, a snippet that would do the job !
Thanks ! |
I can promise you that it is, flatly, not
reliably reproducible on Kindles or ePUB readers and speaking bluntly, (if you are not doing this only for your own reading pleasure) it's a highly problematic idea, usability- and readability-wise, and I say this as someone that's not only done floated images, but,
shame on me, sidebars, successfully (so to speak) in MOBI/Kindle formats.
For one thing, in eBooks, your floated images are anchored to a specific paragraph and in MOBI, generally, they anchor to a specific "point" in the paragraph, typically the top of the paragraph. No matter how clever you are, you can't make the "flow" of the text around/adjacent to that paragraph smooth, "seamless." It won't be. At some point, if the end user enlarges the font (or reduces it!), you will end up with either, the paragraph hanging in space, with the image tagged to the top of it, sitting there like the "eye" of a upper-case P, or with reduced font, you'll have the text all scrunched up to the left/right of the paragraph, with a big gap below it to the following paragraph.
It's just not like print.
I mean...on a smartphone or smaller reader, you get someone who reads at font size 6-7 and they're going to have a line with 2-3 words on it, max, adjacent to the image. That's
no bueno.
And lastly, you cannot realistically get that to work from a word processor, whether that's Word or OO or LO or AWP or Bob's Big Word Processor. If you can work in HTML, you can do this, if you really wish.
One option--and I'm loath to mention it--is that you
COULD do this in tables, but you have the same problem with the cells in their respective rows (and if you are planning to publish to Amazon, Enhanced Typesetting can get very, very cranky around the quantity of tables).
But that does not eliminate or ameliorate the reality of how problematic it is, for publishing, to try to create floated image content, with lines of text over which you have no control, in terms of font size.
But that part is just my humble opinion.
Hitch