MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - "text-indent" not working in Kindle for iOS

jhowell · 06-17-2021, 07:31 PM

The EPUB file has a class named saltoinicio which sets margin-top:33% for the first paragraph of a chapter. Percentage for a margin is based on the width of the container so for a typical portrait page orientation that should make the paragraph start about a quarter of the way down the page.

In the MOBI file produced by calibre that 33% is changed to instead be 150em, which is an unreasonably huge value! That looks to me like a calibre bug. This in turn appears to trigger a bug in the MOBI renderer under iOS, causing the paragraph to start on the next page with some of the initial text missing. The MOBI renderer obviously should not be doing that, but it is somewhat of a garbage-in garbage-out situation.

I converted the EPUB to MOBI using Amazon's Kindle Previewer and in the MOBI file that it creates it leaves the value at 33% and this works OK when loaded into Kindle for iOS. So one possible fix to to use that instead of calibre for this conversion.

06-17-2021, 07:31 PM	#8
jhowell Grand Sorcerer Posts: 7,026 Karma: 90000009 Join Date: Nov 2011 Location: Charlottesville, VA Device: Kindles	The EPUB file has a class named saltoinicio which sets margin-top:33% for the first paragraph of a chapter. Percentage for a margin is based on the width of the container so for a typical portrait page orientation that should make the paragraph start about a quarter of the way down the page. In the MOBI file produced by calibre that 33% is changed to instead be 150em, which is an unreasonably huge value! That looks to me like a calibre bug. This in turn appears to trigger a bug in the MOBI renderer under iOS, causing the paragraph to start on the next page with some of the initial text missing. The MOBI renderer obviously should not be doing that, but it is somewhat of a garbage-in garbage-out situation. I converted the EPUB to MOBI using Amazon's Kindle Previewer and in the MOBI file that it creates it leaves the value at 33% and this works OK when loaded into Kindle for iOS. So one possible fix to to use that instead of calibre for this conversion.