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Originally Posted by hapax legomenon
SCALING IMAGES. how do I plan for image dimensions in relation to the viewing area? Do reading systems automatically scale images? If yes, how do they figure out the optimal image dimensions to use? I want to prevent the image from encompassing 99% of the page (for example)?
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Readers
could automatically scale down images that are larger than the screen, but as far as I know most readers don't do this with ePUB (though they do with mobipocket). With CSS you can limit the width to some percentage of the screen width (which can be 100%), but referencing the screen height probably won't work, since it's not the screen which matters, but the "container", and the container is the whole <body> element, which is as long as needed... it's a bit of a mess, and different readers work in slightly different ways, so there's no practical way to limit the image height, other than using absolute dimensions (in px, mm, em...)
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IMAGE DIMENSIONS AND COMPRESSION. I took a look at Jelby's excellent Prince and the Pauper epub file https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34347, and I see that the cover is 600x800 (136KB) while the other jpegs max at 540x600 (123KB), while a lot of them are under 50K. Aside from the fact that this ebook has a lot of grpahics, are these guidelines good rules of thumbs?
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I've sort of decided on 600×800 as a standard cover size for my ebooks, because that's the size of my Cybook and because it looks like a sensible size. As for the rest of the illustrations, I just scaled the original scans all by the same factor, in order to get illustrations that would more or less fit (again) my Cybook screen (note I created the mobipocket version first). At the same time, I wanted to preserve as much detail as possible, so that the same JPGs could be used for devices with larger screens/resolution.
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WRAPPING AROUND INLINE GRAPHICS. In the ebooks uploaded, I don't recall seeing any images which are floated into the paragraphs. Is this css selector not supported or workable in reader systems?
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Zelda made a version of "Three Men in a Boat" which uses wrapping around images, and there are some samples in the "code snippets" thread. I, however, did not find a completely satisfactory way to float images around that would work fine in all cases (changing screen size and orientation, changing font size...).
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If you don't float graphics, then any image will add extra white space. That's what I'm trying to avoid when I use images. What thoughts do you have?
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True, but I prefer that to some of the artifacts that wrapping text around images (especially when they are not rectangular) could create. But of course, it depends on the case. With "Don Quijote", for instance, all illustrations are full-page or at the start or end of chapters, so there's no problem. Other books have illustrated drop capitals at the beginning of each chapter, there I'd use the wrap-around text without question.