project gutenberg us formating style/method

[lumpynose]

Whenever I look at the html of an epub I've downloaded from the US Project Gutenberg I'm always rolling my eyes. Epubs from other free book sites aren't anywhere nearly as contorted and antediluvian. Even recent books are full of weird stuff (to me).

Anyhow, I was wondering if anyone knows why they do what they do.

[HarryT]

Moved to the ePub forum.

[HarryT]

What did you have in mind? I've recently looked at quite a few PG ePubs and the formatting seemed fairly reasonable to me. The only slightly unusual feature I noticed is the way they add the labels for physical page numbers with, for example:

<span class="pagenum pncolor"><a id="page_10"></a>10</span>

using a media query:

@media screen {
    hr.ppg-pb {
        margin: 30px 0;
        width: 100%;
        border: none;
        border-top: thin dashed silver
        }
    .pagenum {
        display: inline;
        font-size: x-small;
        text-align: right;
        position: absolute;
        right: 2%;
        padding: 1px 3px;
        font-style: normal;
        font-variant: normal;
        font-weight: normal;
        text-decoration: none;
        background-color: inherit;
        border: 1px solid #eee
        }
    .pncolor {
        color: silver
        }
    }

I quite like the appearance of this, though: an inconspicuous boxed page number in light grey ("silver") in the right margin.

[lumpynose]

Yeah, I think I'm just ranting, perhaps more about the older books. Don't ereaders typically start a new page at the start of each .htm file? A lot of the Gutenberg books have the front matter (e.g., the Gutenberg copyright notice in a fixed width font) in the first .htm file with table of contents and even the first chapter. And then they use a bunch of br tags, I'm guessing to try to push things to the next page.

I've backed myself into a corner and decided I must use Sigil's mend and prettify on all of the epub books I've downloaded and then converting them (again) to awz3. Then I see the first file stuff and roll my eyes.

[HarryT]

They use a “page-break-before: always” on the header styles in the CSS to get a page break before the various elements they put in the initial (and final) source file, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

When I edit a PG ePub for my own purposes, I always split them up so each element of the introductory material gets its own source file. This is very easy to do in the Calibre editor.

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by HarryT

They use a “page-break-before: always” on the header styles in the CSS to get a page break before the various elements they put in the initial (and final) source file, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

When I edit a PG ePub for my own purposes, I always split them up so each element of the introductory material gets its own source file. This is very easy to do in the Calibre editor.

Great, thanks. I've been splitting them like you do as well.

[BobC]

Originally Posted by HarryT

They use a “page-break-before: always” on the header styles in the CSS to get a page break before the various elements they put in the initial (and final) source file, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do it.

But they also split chapters between files in mid-chapter even when there is no need from a size point of view to do it. That means on most readers that you get a bogus page break in mid chapter.

For my own use I usually merge everything from Gutenberg into a single big file then get Calibre to split at proper chapter breaks. I also rename all the files into something much shorter and more meaningful.

BobC