Margin Cut issue

[SeaBookGuy]

I don't think I've seen this one covered before ...

I opened an Epub, disliked the rather wide margins on page one, so enabled margin cut, which worked exactly as expected; no more margins. However, that only works for the first page of each chapter! Margin cut has absolutely no effect after that whatsoever for the rest of each chapter; enlarging the size just makes for fewer characters displayed within the narrow-ish vertical page. The book is readable, though that problem is somewhat annoying. Any thoughts?

[kartu]

Did you try it with more than one book?

[Asawi]

It should work for the other pages as well, but the margins don't necessary diappear completely (depending on how the book is made up).
For some reason it cuts more of the margin on the first page in the chapter for me as well, but it does cut the margin on the rest of the pages as well. Open page mode and deselct it and you might be surprised at how big the margins might become!
My (small) problem is that the setting doesn't always keep. I have to set it again. I do it without much thought, but I THINK it's after complete power-off that I have to do it again.

[SeaBookGuy]

Kartu: Yes, I checked another book, worked fine. It's this specfic book.

Asawi: There is almost no difference in the size at all whether the Cut is on or off on the rest of the chapter; on the first page the margins go from very wide to almost none, the text goes all the way to the sides of the screen.

I'm sure it's the book, not my device acting up, but am puzzled why it works only on the first page of each chapter?

[elemenoP]

Did you get the book from Kobo, by any chance? I have seen this before, where the margin cut is affected differently on the first page than on the other pages. It was on a Kobo book where margin cut was not working well after the first page. I think epub just has a setting where you can set the margins differently for the first page of a chapter. I just reformatted the problem book in Calibre.

eP

[SeaBookGuy]

It's actually a liberated library book - I'd be happy to re-convert it in Calibre, but have no idea what settings to change in this case? Would you mind replying with the specific instructions? Thanks!

[elemenoP]

As I recall, my regular "blanket" settings took care of such problems. This is what I have used on one such book:

@font-face {
font-family: "Charis";
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
src: url(res:///Data/fonts/CharisSILR.ttf);
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Charis";
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
src: url(res:///Data/fonts/CharisSILB.ttf);
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Charis";
font-weight: normal;
font-style: italic;
src: url(res:///Data/fonts/CharisSILI.ttf);
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Charis";
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
src: url(res:///Data/fonts/CharisSILBI.ttf);
}
body {
font-family: "Charis";
text-align:justify;
font-size: medium;
line-height: 1.2em;
margin-top: 1em;
margin-left: 1em;
margin-right: 1em;
}

It is all standard stuff. (I have the Charis font loaded on my reader.) If that doesn't work, you will need to explode the epub and look for the offending stylesheet name. I've never had to go that, so I won't be any help, but I'm certain some smartie on here will be.

In addition to margins, I have also seen a different text size on the first page of a chapter. My stylesheet above somehow wiped that out too.

eP

[elemenoP]

oh wait! I don't think the margins above take effect. Because Calibre has another place for setting margins. You need to go into the Page Setup tab and set the margins there. (this is a beef I have with Calibre, actually. I should be able to set my own margins in the CSS.) Try that first: in the Convert dialog, go into Page Settings and set the margins to what you want. You may not need to add any CSS at all. Try setting all the margins to 0.

[dordale]

SeaBookGuy--I'm having the exact same problem with one of my e-books. Margin cut changes the margins on only the first page. All the other pages in the book have very wide margins. I tried converting from ePub to ePub with Calibre and setting the margins to 0 under look and feel (I also tried setting them to 2.0pts). Neither of these options made any difference at all.

Then, I converted the ePub to LRF in Calibre. This fixed the margin problem--but the resulting LRF has about five blank pages between each chapter. I haven't yet tried reconverting the LRF to ePub, but might try that to see if that will fix the margin problem and remove the blank pages created by the LRF conversion.

Unfortunately, I don't know much about the details of ePub file formation, so don't feel comfortable trying to edit them myself.

I'll post if I find a better solution. For this particular book, I may just end up reading the LRF version--it only has 25 or so chapters and I think I'd rather deal with the blank pages than the narrow margins in the ePub file.

dordale

[SeaBookGuy]

Did you have to reset the margins for LRF, or did a straight conversion fix that? Agreed that as a trade-off, a few blank pages to FF through is better than almost every page with funky margins.

For those who haven't experienced this, it's similar to those PDF's that have the wide gray margins on the side, though those read okay @ medium for me.

By the way - this is a Harper Collins book (roll eyes here)

[natasha_fawn]

I've just realized that I'm having almost the same problem on the book I'm currently reading. Luckily for me the margins aren't huge to begin with, but all the margin cut does is slightly narrow the margins on the first page of each chapter and slightly increase the text size on the same page. What the heck? It's not a big enough pain to try to fix at this point, but if I run into another book like I had a while back with 2-inch margins I'll have to fight with calibre about it.

[dordale]

Originally Posted by SeaBookGuy

Did you have to reset the margins for LRF, or did a straight conversion fix that?

My default settings in Calibre is 2.0pts for all margins. That's what I left it at when I converted my book.

dordale

[Bookworm_Girl]

I have had some books where the Extra CSS doesn't work for the whole book conversion. For those books, I open the EPUB in Sigil and edit the various files as required. Sometimes it's as simple as editing the global style sheet. Sometimes I have to go into individual files. I have noticed that some books that have a class setting for the first few paragraphs of the chapter which has different formatting - such as side/top/bottom margins and line spacing etc - than the rest of the paragraphs in the chapter. Perhaps something like that may be the issue with the margin cuts? As the next step I would try opening the unconverted, original EPUB in an editor like Sigil (it's free and there is a whole section on MR related to this software).

[SeaBookGuy]

Thanks, folks --

I tried an LRF conversion, and it made things a whole lot worse!

I'm really not techie enough to go messing with style sheets - this is a 200 page cozy mystery, so I can live with it, if it were a much longer book, I might consider trying that though.

[dordale]

SeabookGuy--Just curious--how did your LRF file turn out?

Like I said mine looks fine--except for the blank pages between each chapters. When I get a chance later today, I'm going to try to convert the LRF back to ePub to see if that will clear up the margin and the page issue. I know all the conversions will probably make for very messy "behind the scenes" code, but as long as it's readable that's all I care about.

Bookworm_Girl--I have messed around with Sigil a little--usually just to fix tables of contents. If I'm feeling ambitious, I might try using that this evening. But, as little as I know about what goes on behind the scenes, I'm liable to do my book more harm than good!

dordale