[Hitch]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

The designers of eBooks can't seem to figure how to consistently use and kind of inline formatting tags (span, em, etc.).

I've seen books with something like the following:

<p>“They <em>knew.”</em></p>
<p>“But <em>how</em>?”</p>

Later, there'd be a wrap of the question mark and the quotes:

<p>“And <em>now?”</em></p>

I don't know if there are any rules about what should get wrapped by the <em>, but pick a standard and stick to it in the same book.

I would not assume it's the ebook designers. 99% of the time, we get files from the authors, and those elements (punctuation) are already formatted, either bold, italic, or whatever. There are exceedingly few customers out there that want to pay an eBook formatter to go through their book and conform all the quotation marks, etc., around italicization, bold, and the like.

Originally Posted by Renate

Although I get confused/disagree on whether terminating punctuation goes inside quotes or not I am consistent in making <b>, <i> or <span> apply only to the characters of a word and not punctuation.

Probably because, at least in English, we have two very different sets of rules, depending on whether you are from the USA or Canadian, British, Aussie, etc. It's hard to remember correctly over years of burnout. LOL.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Personally I tend to wrap punctuation in the italic or bold tags. There are some fonts when for example an italic ? is not distinguishable from a non-italic ? but there are also quite a few where they are different. I also tend to use two punctuation marks where I feel that they are needed. For example, Jill replied "But John, what you said was 'How do we know that she is dead?'." The question mark being part of the quote while the period is the end of the sentence spoken by Jill.

The problem is, in ebooks, unlike print, you can't compensate for the spacing, between italicized text and non-italicized parentheticals, closing quotation marks, and the like, and it looks weird as hell.

It's..in my opinion, when you get text that can't be kerned, can't be tracked, and has this scenario fairly often (punctuation coming right before/on the heels of text formatting), conformance can be better than being technically correct. I know, grab those pitchforks, but...that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Hitch