I'm thinking of doing a style survey

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by simplyparticular

Here's one to add:
Do missing scene/section breaks within chapters irritate you?

Absolutely.

[LDBoblo]

Everyone has their own preferences, as idiosyncratic as they may be. I tend to put together my own books, and generally adopt a slightly less cavalier style than many ebook readers in this community would. Though I have gotten lazier more recently (buying paper books instead), many of my books are well-crafted compared to what the ebook standard is.

Even so, there are many here who would much prefer the page on the left in my picture to the page on the right. Some of those people would choose it just to be contrary, while others have developed a taste for narrower fonts or a denser (blacker) text block. Others still have become accustomed to the rather primitive styles of most ebooks and find more advanced things to be gaudy and distracting.

So I guess choice is king, but it certainly would be nice to have some measure of quality in the first place.

[Clancy_s]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

Everyone has their own preferences, as idiosyncratic as they may be.

Absolutely.

I think most people really want to be able to specify their own settings: even if they don't want to have to do it themselves.

I'm happy with epub, since having worked out what customisations I like in Calibre and having applied a hack* that will enforce my prefences on my ereader epubs are displayed the way I want on my reader.

* the hack doesn't work with other formats, which is one of the reason I prefer epubs

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've found the opposite. I've found the spacing used in section breaks to be too large. This is because they have to differentiate from a section break and a paragraph space (which we don't need and we don't want).

When it comes to section breaks/point of view changes, I prefer a simple visual marker on a line by itself. I normally use "~~~" centered on a line by itself with a blank line above and below because it's simple and should be able to be consistently generated in any format since the "~" character itself is plain text. It's also distinctive regardless of the spacing between the paragraphs.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Alex, if you look at most ePub, you'll see that's not a good style.

Thanks, Jon, and Anemic Oak for your to Jon's response. I've just downloaded For the Win.ePub and will have a look at it and its stylesheet later tonight.

I entirely agree with your comment quoted above. Part of my reason for doing the survey is to see if we can get some agreement on what constitutes good style. I have my preferences, you have yours, Fred down the road has his, and Freda next door has hers. Perhaps we can do a bit of giving and taking and get a generally acceptable core.

The other main reason is to get (I hope) ammunition to influence publishers to allow as wide a choice as possible for the style of ebooks. I don't know whether I will like Fontin until I see it, but I can tell you now I really dislike having someone choose my font for me. If the embedded font is applied to the text in the ebook then that will diminish my pleasure in reading it.

Regards, Alex

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by simplyparticular

Here's one to add:
Do missing scene/section breaks within chapters irritate you?

Good one. I'll certainly include that question.

Regards, Alex

[goodscoolwf]

Good idea, but needs moe detailed plan.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Might work for most, but wouldn't for me. #1 hate the font, #2 the no margins at all doesn't work for me. I don't like the big margins a lot of ePubs try to force on you, but I do need a small amount of space between the edge of the reader and the text. Other than that it is how I like my books though.

Like the font, hate the margin-less layout... The letters will "blend" with the device if you remove all margins, especially on the left.

Especialy if you take into account that horrible page number epubs have...

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I agree the fonts used are subjective, but if you are trying to make a single catchall ePub, then no margins may be the way to go. Take a look at iBooks and you'll see it uses pretty big margins and if you have some margins specified, you may end up with even more of a waste of screen space on the iPad or iPhone/Touch. If I had to have a choice of the normally large margins or no margins, no margins wins. But I could handle a tiny amount of margins of say maybe 10px left/right and no margins top/bottom.

Acutally, the entire layout is subjective. The main reason I never read epub is that my BeBook Mini didn't have a top margin. And the shadow the device threw on the screen in certain lighting conditions made sure i couldn't read the top line in that case. The same with the left margin. The right margin has that silly page number which interferes with the text.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've found the opposite. I've found the spacing used in section breaks to be too large. This is because they have to differentiate from a section break and a paragraph space (which we don't need and we don't want).

Is that a problem of the section break? It's more a question of: do you show empty lines between paragraphs or not. (which I hate btw).

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

Everyone has their own preferences, as idiosyncratic as they may be. I tend to put together my own books, and generally adopt a slightly less cavalier style than many ebook readers in this community would. Though I have gotten lazier more recently (buying paper books instead), many of my books are well-crafted compared to what the ebook standard is.

Even so, there are many here who would much prefer the page on the left in my picture to the page on the right. Some of those people would choose it just to be contrary, while others have developed a taste for narrower fonts or a denser (blacker) text block. Others still have become accustomed to the rather primitive styles of most ebooks and find more advanced things to be gaudy and distracting.

So I guess choice is king, but it certainly would be nice to have some measure of quality in the first place.

I prefer the second one... But even the first one is prefered over a lot of other formats I've seen. Quality is something that is not nr one for a lot of publishers, or so it seems...

[Lemurion]

I guess hard-coding everything so it cannot display Arial is completely out of the question.



I'm one of those who worries less about the choices the publisher or device programmers make than how incompetently they implement them.

I generally prefer ragged right on ebooks because its harder to do it disastrously badly. Full justification doesn't seem to have a middle ground between perfect and "Oh My God that's terrible!" I also work with manuscripts a lot - and those are usually done ragged right.

I also prefer a serif font.

The rest I can deal with so long as it doesn't get in the way of the reading experience. I prefer indented paragraphs with no line breaks between them, because it makes it easier to show scene breaks, and doesn't make dialogue look funky.

[kacir]

Many people here talk about separating paragraphs with an empty line. I do not think that is a good solution. A full empty line, especially when the previous paragraph ended in a very short line can be distracting and is also quite wasteful from the point of view of 5" screen real estate.

If you do not like to have first line indentation, it is much better, IMHO, to separate paragraphs by a space that is only slightly wider than a regular space between lines.
Fortunately my reading device does support such solution.

[Jim Chapman]

Maybe it was there in the discussion already, but another possible question is:
- what is your preferred line-spacing? (single spaced, double spaced, 0.9, 1.1 ...)
And another:
- do you like the cover image to appear as the first page of your book?

[GeoffC]

In a book of fiction, is a TOC necessary ?

[Thinking here more of the Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (blank variety) ...]

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

In a book of fiction, is a TOC necessary ?

[Thinking here more of the Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (blank variety) ...]

Probably not absolutely necessary, but they can sure be nice to have especially if you're reading a book on more than one device.


Speaking of TOC's Penguin has an annoying habit of not including the Prologue (if there is one) of a book in their TOC's. A couple of times I've almost missed the beginning of the book because of it.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Probably not absolutely necessary, but they can sure be nice to have especially if you're reading a book on more than one device.

As I only read one book on one reader, I hadn't thought of that (thanks) ... slinks away quietly ....

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

- what is your preferred line-spacing? (single spaced, double spaced, 0.9, 1.1 ...)

I like tightly spaced lines, so I can get as much text on screen as conveniently possible.
Depending on font I vary between 1 and 0.8
Some fonts produce very tight spaced lines, others much wider.
Also, various fonts produce various physical sizes with the same "point size" setting on my PocketBook.

Another question for the font:
Do you prefer large x-height, medium one or small ...

Another font you should definitely present among choices is Droid. Free, professionally looking, developed especially for devices with small screens.