Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr_H_Poirot
I see that some on here edit .CSS files to make changes to formatting of books. I have fewer books than most of you but I was wondering why there is a need to format given that things like font and line spacing and justification can usually be set on the e-reader itself
Is it mainly to take out acknowledgement pages etc and shorten the book?
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Yes, some of it is to remove garbage (if I have a 2012 e-book from a still-living-and-writing author, I don't need a page of "Also by" entries stuck in 2012... and the less said about RandomPenguin's "NextReads" trash the better).
That said, many reading systems
cannot set "font and line spacing and justification," and more to the point (a) require the human reading to know that in advance, and (b) are easily overridden by (often poorly chosen) publisher hardcoding anyway. For example, if the publisher hardcodes all paragraphs to be flush left, unindented, and with a full blank line between each paragraph, the settings of an e-reader, whether a program or a device, won't overcome that — and that gets very difficult to follow for books that have block quotations, or interspersed poetry, or multicolumn layouts (like annotated speeches).
Put another way, not all books — probably not the majority of books I have — are straight narrative text like the average mystery novel. That means editing the CSS, especially for anything that was ineptly transcoded by the publisher from a previously-available-only-in-print version.