Line Break Madness on Nook

[AuthorGreg]

Greetings All!

I hand-coded a book entirely in HTML and CSS. I learned from a book how to package ePubs. All HTML and CSS files passed validation. The ePub passed validation on the IDPF site. The book, when side-loaded on a Nook, looks beautiful. Everything displays as it should. The same goes for Adobe Digital Editions.

Even on the Nook Press site it looks good with the provided Nook Previewer.

BUT!

When I went to Barnes & Noble tonight, to my horror I saw that on every Nook model that there are line breaks after EVERY paragraph. All of these would have been styled with p elements.

My CSS for p elements is as follows:

p
{
text-indent: 1.25em;
margin: 0;
widows: 2;
orphans: 2; 
}

The only exception is this CSS for the first paragraph of each chapter, and this comes after the first p element:

p.texttop
{
margin: 1.5em 0 0 0;
text-indent: 0;
}

I'm at a total loss. Nook Press Support, needless to say, was at a loss. I have verified also that after the KindleGen process, everything looks superb on the Kindle (though I am, of course, using a different CSS file for the Kindle as well as making the necessary mods in the ePub structure).

Any help would be groovy.

Thanks!

Greg

[JSWolf]

Please give the name of the book so someone can go to B&N and download a sample.

[AuthorGreg]

Return To Middle C by Gregory Shultz.

Thanks!

[JSWolf]

I just have a look at the sample via the read online and it looks good. I'll now download it and have a look at the code.

[AuthorGreg]

I just downloaded a sample to my Nook Simple Touch. It looked fine. But again, EVERY Nook in that store was whacky with it.

Thanks for helping me!

Greg

[JSWolf]

The sample looks good in ADE 2.0 and on my nook STR. It's actually well formatted. But one thing I would change is I would move widows and orphans to body and make then both 0.

[AuthorGreg]

Thanks for the suggestion on the widows and orphans. I'll get that in there.

So what could it be about these Nooks at the store? I mean, I found some books where the paragraph spacing was fine, so I ruled out any funky line height and margin settings that someone at the store might have been responsible for.

Weird, huh?

Greg

[AuthorGreg]

By the way, if I place 0 values for widows and orphans, the CSS validation fails. Just getting rid of them should be fine, right?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

By the way, if I place 0 values for widows and orphans, the CSS validation fails. Just getting rid of them should be fine, right?

I use widows and orphans of 0 all the time and epubcheck never yells at me. If you remove them, you go back to 2 as 2 is the default. Try 1 then. That should work.

Yes, it is odd that the nooks at the store display your book oddly.

[AuthorGreg]

Well, I just went back to that store. I tried every device. Every model, including the STR, has the line breaks. I've about decided that B&N isn't worth the trouble....

G

[AuthorGreg]

Hi JS,

That widows and orphans CSS advice you gave me was great. Makes the text flow in a more meaningful fashion. Print books have "orphans" and "widows" all the time, so I've never understood the big deal about them. Now for my CreateSpace exploits I have to learn how to get rid of them in Word.

Anyway, this Nook thing is driving me bonkers. If anyone else has run into this, please chime in. I'd really like to get it worked out.

Thanks again!

Greg

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

Hi JS,

That widows and orphans CSS advice you gave me was great. Makes the text flow in a more meaningful fashion. Print books have "orphans" and "widows" all the time, so I've never understood the big deal about them. Now for my CreateSpace exploits I have to learn how to get rid of them in Word.

Anyway, this Nook thing is driving me bonkers. If anyone else has run into this, please chime in. I'd really like to get it worked out.

Thanks again!

Greg

Widows and orphans are different for a small screen vs a paper book. I do feel that you don't need them for a small screen.

Bring your nook with you to try out the book. I have no idea why it would look so odd on the in-store nooks yet the sample looks great.

[AuthorGreg]

Yeah, I just eliminated widows and orphans from the print book, and it didn't look good. I'm trying to figure out how the pros keep the lines even on opposite pages while keeping widows and orphans at bay. They must shrink and expand the font or line height in minute amounts to compensate.

I'm wondering if the in-store Nooks are absent any firmware upgrades that would prevent this type of mess. I cannot reproduce the error on any of my home Nook devices. Weird, weird, weird....

G

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

Yeah, I just eliminated widows and orphans from the print book, and it didn't look good. I'm trying to figure out how the pros keep the lines even on opposite pages while keeping widows and orphans at bay. They must shrink and expand the font or line height in minute amounts to compensate.

There are a number of tricks. First of all, paragraph breaking in real typesetting systems is not the simple-minded "fill the line until there's no more space left" method, but it takes into account the whole paragraph and chooses the breakpoints that (ideally) make the whitespace more even. This allows forcing a paragraph to have one more or one less line than it wants (and you could do that with a paragraph a few pages before the problem). Then stretching or shrinking the letters themselves by tiny, usually unnoticeable amounts helps in getting the paragraphs look right. Real picky people even rewrite some passage to get a better pagebreak (this works if you are writing e.g. a thesis, not so useful when you are typesetting someone else's words).

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

I'm wondering if the in-store Nooks are absent any firmware upgrades that would prevent this type of mess. I cannot reproduce the error on any of my home Nook devices. Weird, weird, weird....

G

That's the most probable reason, as others here wrote having no issues with it too. The real users do maintenance on their devices.
Some guy being told to: "unpack and mount the demo units" will most likely not care or know or - worst case - be told by the boss not to "waste time" on them.