[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by radius

Hi Nate, great idea for a thread.

Personally, I would like to use heading tags for chapter titles. So for example, I might use h1 for the book title and then h2 for each chapter title because I don't see chapter titles as just being special paragraphs.

Then, since there seems to be a slight preference on Mobileread among North American English readers to have paragraphs indicated by indenting but not indent the first paragraph, I would add something like this:

I like to make the chapter headings a defined amount larger than the text for reasons of control. I don't know for certain that the header tags will scale at the same rate as the text when the user changes the font size. If I use p tags to designate so many sizes larger, then I will know how it behaves.

Originally Posted by radius

Edit: Also, I'm curious why you put some top margin in your first paragraph of text. Why not put bottom margin on the chapter title? Then all of the text could be just plain paragraphs.

That's an excellent idea. This way we only need to insert one tag and attribute, instead of two.

Originally Posted by radius

Edit 2: If you use some kind of break to indicate switch of point of view, or time has passed etc. (like a horizontal rule, or maybe some centered asterisks etc.) don't forget to make a rule for the first paragraph after the break to also not indent....

Actually, most of the paper books I've checked have that first paragraph after the scene break indented. BTW, I love the hr tag, but after several request I now use 3 centered asterisks instead. A non-indented paragraph would be a good idea for those ebook creators who use blank space as a scene break, though. The blank space separator is too subtle for me.

Originally Posted by Elsi

Guys -- this is exciting!

Can someone relate this markup to Calibre? It seems that although I start from the same source that Calibre's "rules" for chapter detection are different for LRF output than they are for MOBI output. I find that I just run Calibre with all the defaults when I create books, and I'm sure there is a smarter way to do this.

It's possible to tell calibre what tags and atributes to build a toc out of. This really belongs in a separate thread. I'll start it later tonight.

EDIT: Maybe tomorrow.