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Old 01-21-2025, 04:46 AM   #3
JSWolf
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TechieBooks View Post
Aside from that, there's one other part of the KDP guidelines I'd appreciate clarification on and it's this: "When using left or right margin and padding CSS properties, specify the values in percentage (%) instead of em units. This ensures that the margins do not grow too wide with large font sizes and impair reading."
They don't provide a code example for this anywhere in the guidelines. I am well versed in HTML/CSS and even I cannot come up with a means of making this actually work in percentage rather than ems. It does not at all look similar nor behave similar to em units in percentage (for instance, you can't actually CENTER the content with a left and right margin using percentage units; I also observed that the margins are fixed and therefore look dipropionate and ridiculous at larger font sizes, anyway). The desired behavior/presentation of these usage instances would be declaring a width (like with images, in percentage)... which is the same presentational look and behavior we get when we use em units for this, but not with percentage units for this.

I have not personally observed this cited "problem" with using em units for this instead of their suggested percentage units. Opinions? Please do air them. I am tempted to directly recommend disregarding this suggestion in favor of em units not percentage units.

For usage instance: offset content, like letters, news articles, fancy formatted signage, things like that. Mostly that would be limited in left and right margins to 1em, 2em, and 3em, depending on what they are (very small margins). I can't think of any reason to apply margins greater than that for anything in either fiction or nonfiction. But I can imagine that applying large values to this with ems would result in what they describe... I just don't see it with 1em to 3em.[/QUOTE]

Don't use % for margins. If you do, you get a different size margin for different size screens. I've seen a lot of eBooks from Amazon with a text indent of 7% witch is too large. And on a Kindle Scribe is even larger. I use a text indent of 1.2em and that looks good. Even if it changes with the font size change, it keeps it consistent based on the font size.

Also, don't make the chapter headers with so much wasted space. I've seen wasted space of 15% in some eBooks. Don't use %. Use em. 1em top/1em boom margins works well.

It sounds like Amazon's guidelines have some rather stupid stuff in there.
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