Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
...With Standard Ebooks I don't think I've ever seen a book that they've put out that isn't also available elsewhere from the usual places for free. If I'm just reformatting a book to suit my own preferences I'd rather start with one from Project Gutenberg, Faded Page, etc. since there's not so much "junk" to deal with.
|
Originally, I had a free version of the book from Amazon. But, when I loaded it up on my ereader, it was unreadable. I popped it into Calibre Editor and the formatting looked like it was done by a drunk on lsd. It wasn't any kind of newfangled, complex stuff. It was just badly done and fixing it would take longer than I wanted. So, I headed over to Project Gutenberg, downloaded a new copy there and, though better, it was still badly done (it looks like my old Amazon version was based off Gutenberg's). So, off I went to Standard Ebooks. Yes, the formatting is complex and not to my taste. But, at least the structure of the book was formatted decently.
As I was changing the formatting around, I was saying the exact same thing you mentioned: I can understand "publishers" wanting to go the semantically correct way (they have a lot of very different people reading things). But, for my purposes, I just need a simply formatted book that I can adjust as needed. I don't need thousands of lines of styling information across scores of classes. In this book, after I was done with it, I ended up with about a dozen:
Code:
@page { margin-top: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; }
blockquote {
margin-top: 1em;
margin-right: 1.7em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
margin-left: 1.7em;
font-style: italic;
}
body { widows: 1; orphans: 1 }
h1, h2 {
text-align: center;
margin-top: 0.8em;
margin-bottom: 0.8em;
}
hr {
margin-top: 0.9em;
margin-bottom: 0.9em;
border: none;
}
hr::before {
content: "***";
display: block;
text-align: center;
}
h2 + p, h3 + p, h4 + p, hr + p {
text-indent: 0;
}
img {
max-height: 100%;
max-width: 100%;
}
p {
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 1;
text-indent: 1.2em;
}
.center {
text-align: center;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
text-indent: 0;
}
.copy {
font-size: small;
margin-top: 0.5em;
text-align: center;
text-indent: 0;
}
.ded {
text-align: center;
text-indent: 0;
margin-top: 3em;
}
.footnote {
font-family: sans-serif;
font-size: 0.7em;
margin-top: 1.5em;
margin-bottom: 1.5em;
margin-left: 4em;
margin-right: 4em;
text-indent: 0;
border-top: 1px solid black;
border-bottom: 1px solid black;
page-break-inside: avoid;
}
And, it was that many only because of the footnotes and a couple of more-specific classes that I added in since they keep recurring in various books.
Just as JSWolf said in that Standard Ebooks thread I referred to earlier, I wish SE would produce a simple, standard version of their books and leave the fancy stuff to their "Advanced" formatted version.