Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
The psuedo elements are best for web page CSS, or your own home use. not real ebooks via retail distribution. As remarked they look strange with punctuation, but any form of “different from default body style” styling of text other than maybe oblique/italic looks strange with punctuation, no matter how it's styled. There is also a theory that punctuation should not be italic and only bold in a bold heading/title.
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I'd agree with the "via retail distribution" aspect...that's why I mentioned that they needed to ensure that it would work on their "targeted device" AND MY BOOKS ARE "REAL EBOOKS"!
As far as looking strange...yes, they can, as I mentioned. I wish they would fix that. As I also said, you can get used to it. What I didn't mention was that, before I got used to it, I tended to be liberal with enforcing grammar rules
in that respect. For the few first-paragraphs-in-the-chapter-that-also-start-with-punctuation... I just deleted the leading punctuation.
The vast majority of readers (and, unfortunately, a good chunk of authors) don't know (or don't care) about grammar rules and they wouldn't ever notice the missing punctuation. I even tested it against my latin-teacher wife and she never noticed it... although, to be fair, Latin didn't really care so much about punctuation to begin with...
Edit:
In addition, if your device, or software, does not support the pseudo-elements, they are required to fail gracefully. ie they don't crash, they will just ignore the unknown tag. In this case it would revert to a normal looking paragraph with no indent and not wrapped around any floaters. If the device does puke on it...then it is not standards-compliant.