Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
The secret is to realise that the ebook specs started out simply for simple novels with either images in their own paragraph and centred, or small. In both cases no frame in MS Word/LO Writer and "anchor as character". Superscript and subscript work if carefully styled. Forget things like SMALL CAPS, raised caps, drop caps; anyway many readers don't like them they reduce reading comprehension and have erratic support. Accessibility is important, so alt text for every image and not trying to be clever or fancy.
If you are doing a text book, or fancy stuff in epub3, accept that it won't work for many and widespread commercial distribution will either be rejected or cause problems for purchasers.
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Personally, I consider them to be electronic books – so one should be able to style them somewhat like a book.
The "fancy" stuff is usually not that difficult. "Initial-letter" works pretty well and is widely supported – I don't have any reading app that doesn't support it. If it's not supported by a renderer it's not a big deal either. It can simpy be ignored (though I really think this absolutely
needs to be supported on modern reading devices. Drop caps and raised caps are widely used and initial-letter is great solution for all the problems everybody is having with them).
Mirrored text (with an svg wrapper) works flawlessly for me as well.
On the other hand I've been trying to keep images and captions together on one page with <figure> and <figcaption>. Sounds very basic, but it's surprisingly challenging. With four different reading applications I can get four different results. They all behave very differently.
Also page breaks: epub is a format for books. The content is almost always displayed as pages. Yet the concept of pages is not even implemented into many readers and they use columns instead–and the two concepts may clash. Setting pagebreaks with CSS should really be quite simple. But the only way to make them work consistently in all reading apps is by splitting up the document.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Can you tell me how to make a dropcap look good if I change the font, change the font size, and/or change the line height?
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That's what the "
initial-letter" property is for. You set the size and sink and the renderer calculates the actual height and placement depending on the line height and font size.