Possible to remove indents?

[cybmole]

interesting - I am suprised that amazon have followed the printed book conventions on their Kindle releases - laziness or what ? I buy into the "save paper" explanation for why the standard eveloved but there's no need to "save paper" in an e-book - what is needed is maximum readability.

I wonder what amazon's own welcome to kindle user guide formatting looks like....
downloading from archive back onto Kindle...
AHA - no indents - blank lines between paragraphs - well well well - consistent they aint !

I cannot test, but I wonder what conventions other e-book sellers use e.g. B&N Nook, sony + waterstones....

also interesting to note that, as per my previous post, there is this alternative "use no indents + blank lines convention" for web published articles - & which I like to see also on my Kindle. I tried putting the same book onto K3 with both layouts to confirm that.

I cannot find any web news site / articles site that follows the printed book convention of indenting.

I checked salon.com, wired.com cnn.com - surely these guys know a thing or two about readability

[MrPLD]

Given that a lot of the eBooks on Amazon are submitted directly by the authors/publishers, it's not surprising there's no consistency, that said, go through a few printed books and you'll see much the same when it comes to things like line spacing, margins, fonts, kerning, headers and footers.

[Jellby]

Reading a website or news site is (it seems to me) quite different from reading a book. For websites, like this forum, I usually prefer "typewriter style", with vertical space between paragraphs and other simple typesetting (straight quote marks, for instance). It makes it look less "dense" and more inviting to read.

But for books, I undoubtedly prefer the standard practice of indents, no space and full justification. It makes the text more uniform, it leads me more into the story, it looks nicer (to me). And when I say "books", I include ebooks, of course.

[DMSmillie]

The thing about ebook formatting is that many (most?) seem to want to keep it as similar as possible to print book formatting, so that ebooks look like "real" books. I've even seen people scoff at ebooks formatted differently, saying they aren't "professional". I detest that kind of mentality.

As far as readability goes, I'd suggest there are probably differences between reading web pages on a monitor and reading text on smaller displays, particularly when one is LCD and the other is e-ink. Having said that, though, I'm not aware of anyone doing any serious work on readability on e-readers - as far as I can see, Neilsen, for example, has so far mostly focused on usability issues, and not much, yet, on design and readability. He touches on it in an article on Kindle Content Design, but only in passing.

[MrPLD]

It'll be interesting to see what trends emerge over the next 12~24 months. I feel that there will be a readability difference in styling between reflective (eInk) vs emmissive (LCD/OLED) displays.

I also tend to dislike the notion of scoffing at ebooks formatted differently, I think it's vastly too early to determine.

What I will however be interested in is to see how the various typesetting engines develop with this new media in mind (especially the TeX engine in my case).

Paul.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

The first is objective and observable, the second is entirely subjective and a matter of personal preference.

It's true that the convention in book formatting is to indent the first line of a paragraph (except when it's the first paragraph following a chapter or section heading) and have no space between paragraphs. But that's just a convention - something which most likely came into being through a desire on the part of publishers and printers to minimize the number of pages required to print a book and as a result minimize the cost of printing a book. We've all simply become used to it when reading printed books. I respect the fact that you think it looks better like that, but I don't agree that that automatically means it look better to everyone.

Thing is, I've seen polls in the past on how an eBook looks best and most people have replying with indents and no paragraph spacing. So if you want to possibly please most of your intended audience, that's the format you should use. The problem is that the paragraph spaces take you away from the book. The section breaks do the same thing but when you know you are going into a different section, you know that and you are OK.

Now, you could offer two differently formatted versions to please even more people. But most eBooks that come formatted with paragraph spaces also have other formatting issues overall that also are annoying. A lot have wide margins and a small text size instead of the default text size. And to me, having proper paragraphs with indents and no paragraph spaces keeps me in the book. The blank lines are a distraction.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

The thing about ebook formatting is that many (most?) seem to want to keep it as similar as possible to print book formatting, so that ebooks look like "real" books. I've even seen people scoff at ebooks formatted differently, saying they aren't "professional". I detest that kind of mentality.

They don't have a professional look to them. They look sloppy and like they were put together in a rush. if you've ever dived into publisher ePubs, you will see that a lot of them are sloppy and unprofessional under the hood. I've been there, done that and fixed it. I take a publisher ePub, strip the DRM, and then fix it to how I like it even if that means just removing the margins and adjusting the indent to what I want. But when I am done, I have a much nicer eBook to read. One that looks good and feels comfortable to read.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Thing is, I've seen polls in the past on how an eBook looks best and most people have replying with indents and no paragraph spacing. So if you want to possibly please most of your intended audience, that's the format you should use. The problem is that the paragraph spaces take you away from the book. The section breaks do the same thing but when you know you are going into a different section, you know that and you are OK.

.

1.any chance of a link to poll questions & results?

2. if the book is well written then it takes more than a blank line to "take me away from the book"

Real old-fashioned (hardback) books are mostly larger than e-reader devices, so what looks best on a hardback book page does not necessarily translate well to a 5 inch or 6 inch e-ink screen..

paperbacks seem to be produced with no regard for readability - just shrink n squeeze it onto cheap paper & hope the customer does not complain when the whole thing falls apart after a couple of reads.

anyway it's just a couple of clicks in calibre look n feel preferences or a simple tweak to sigil css to flip between the 2 options

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

Having said that, however, if you submit essentially unformatted HTML via the KDP interface, or email it to your Kindle for automatic conversion, Amazon's system will default to formatting it with a paragraph first line indent and no space between paragraphs.

Actually I believe they include 2 extra pixels between paragraphs which actually looks pretty nice. The more words on a page the less often you have to change pages which is a good thing. I think the original publishers were not just saving paper they see turning pages as a minor interference to the reading.

Dale

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Actually I believe they include 2 extra pixels between paragraphs which actually looks pretty nice. The more words on a page the less often you have to change pages which is a good thing. I think the original publishers were not just saving paper they see turning pages as a minor interference to the reading.

Dale

how would you use .css styling to do that ( add 2 pixels between paragraphs )

do you have to translate pixel measurements into pts or ems ?

I've developed a sense of what 1 em looks like, have not mastered points yet, as I read somewhere the ems scale better with text & thus are a preferred option for ebook layouts

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

how would you use .css styling to do that ( add 2 pixels between paragraphs )

p { margin-top: 2px }

do you have to translate pixel measurements into pts or ems ?

No, you can use "px" in CSS.

I've developed a sense of what 1 em looks like, have not mastered points yet, as I read somewhere the ems scale better with text & thus are a preferred option for ebook layouts

Points are an absolute unit of length, like millimeters or inches (1 pt = 1/72 in), as long as the renderer and the screen as properly set up. They don't change scale with anything, because a point is a point is a point, unless the renderer has some kind of magnification option.

Ems are font-dependent. If you change the font or the text size, an em changes too. Sometimes that's desirable, sometimes it's not.

Pixels are device-dependent. A pixel is a "point" in the screen (do not confuse with the above points), it's the minimal detail size for the screen. If you move to a screen with a different resolution, a pixel size will change. Sometimes that's desirable, sometimes it's not.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Jellby

p { margin-top: 2px }


Pixels are device-dependent. A pixel is a "point" in the screen (do not confuse with the above points), it's the minimal detail size for the screen. If you move to a screen with a different resolution, a pixel size will change. Sometimes that's desirable, sometimes it's not.

thanks - seems a poor choice then - my PC screen has far more pixels than my Kindle - 1920x1200 vs whatever Kindle is - 400x800?, so books will look different in Kindle for PC than on actual Kindle if pixel spacing is used.

I think I'll stick with ems ,though I've yet to learn what fractional values of ems work on kindle. I have seen e.g. book styles with .5 em top and .5 em bottom margin defined for <p tags.
I did read that K can't do fractional em indents but maybe it CAN do fractional em line spacings ?

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I think I'll stick with ems ,though I've yet to learn what fractional values of ems work on kindle. I have seen e.g. book styles with .5 em top and .5 em bottom margin defined for <p tags.
I did read that K can't do fractional em indents but maybe it CAN do fractional em line spacings ?

The Kindle does not use ePUB, it uses Mobi, and the Mobi format does not allow fractions, and only the units "em", "pt", "%" or nothing for pixels. What will whatever converter you are using do with other values or units is something I can't tell.

[DMSmillie]

It's also worth noting that, as Jellby first pointed out to me several months ago (to my initial disbelief ), the MOBI/PRC format doesn't natively use or understand any CSS at all. Applications (such as Kindlegen, Mobipocket Creator and Calibre) that convert other formats to MOBI/PRC have to interpret the CSS and convert it into the closest approximation available in the rather basic HTML (plus a few proprietary tags) used in the MOBI/PRC format. This is the main reason that the formatting options available in a MOBI book are substantially less than what you can do in an EPUB book.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Jellby

The Kindle does not use ePUB, it uses Mobi, and the Mobi format does not allow fractions, and only the units "em", "pt", "%" or nothing for pixels. What will whatever converter you are using do with other values or units is something I can't tell.

i know that, but I do my look n feel edit in epub then convert to mobi once it looks good in an epub viewer.

if what you say above is correct, then there's no way to add a 2 pixel line gap anyway ?

you say mobi does not allow fractions so will it round up or ignore, or is that decision left to the epub to mobi converter.

lets say my epub css says to leave .5 em above and .5 em below each <p tag. how is that converted to mobi ?.

is the mobi spec easy to find and understand ?
a quick google found this book for sale - maybe there are other free sources ?
http://kindleformatting.com/book/