mdash - a good thing or not - in e-books

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by cybmole

English style.. american standard... are there really such things ?

No, I don't believe so. The majority of my paper books are published by British publishers; I don't think I've come across a single one which DOESN'T use an em-dash without spaces.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, I don't believe so. The majority of my paper books are published by British publishers; I don't think I've come across a single one which DOESN'T use an em-dash without spaces.

I think I have some (and I don't have that many English books), I'll see if I can find it

There seems to be more division between double quotes and single quotes, though.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There seems to be more division between double quotes and single quotes, though.

I've just checked a dozen of my British-published books, and they all use a single quote for speech, unlike the US-published ones, which use double quotes. Based on that admittedly small sample, I'd say it's pretty consistent that single quotes are still the norm in the UK.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I've just checked a dozen of my British-published books, and they all use a single quote for speech, unlike the US-published ones, which use double quotes. Based on that admittedly small sample, I'd say it's pretty consistent that single quotes are still the norm in the UK.

It's sad that UK and US publishers don't use guillemets for speech. Lots of Croatian books use them and frankly, my personal opinion is that they're the best option.

But since most of the books I read are in English, I find myself missing guillemets every single time.

Sure, I could go through every epub I read (and de-DRM) and replace all the quotes, but that's a chore and I'm too lazy to do it.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Valloric

It's sad that UK and US publishers don't use guillemets for speech. Lots of Croatian books use them and frankly, my personal opinion is that they're the best option.

They look odd to me, but that's just because I'm not used to reading books that use them.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Valloric

It's sad that UK and US publishers don't use guillemets for speech. Lots of Croatian books use them and frankly, my personal opinion is that they're the best option.

Second best, after the dash to start each character speech

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Sure, I could go through every epub I read (and de-DRM) and replace all the quotes, but that's a chore and I'm too lazy to do it.

... or you could add an option to Sigil to do it automatically .

[sourcejedi]

Originally Posted by cybmole

ok - so softbreak is not a workable idea - I admit I dont know much about softbreaks - I'd heard the term & i think have occasionally seen something in html code - <WBR> ?

Yes, but that's never been standardized. So it's definitely not part of XHTML, and so using it in EPUB will cause a validation failure. The hint is you always see it referred to as <WBR>, never <WBR/> :-P.

E-reader software is definitely _allowed_ to be smarter, at least by the latest draft specs. Note that if you're one of the few who use (at least the no longer maintained C version of) FBReader, it will break lines after an emdash.

Personally I hold the entire industry in contempt, including the epub spec writers, but hey, what's new. They haven't got basic justification right yet[1]. Hopefully as people address that mess (implementing hyphenation, for example), they'll realize there's a problem with emdash and it'll be sorted out eventually.



I did search this earlier, and found a hideous hack which is emitted by Word, exploiting the text direction specifications to allow breaking at a given point. But it didn't say that it works on e-readers (and given that ADE doesn't support text direction specified by HTML tags, it probably doesn't). So I'd suggest not doing that .

[1] The original MobiPocket guidelines say not to specify justification / left alignment for body text; the e-reader should be able to decide. But both IDPF and Amazon dropped the ball.

Spoiler:

<RANT MODE ON>

As usual, Amazon have no excuse. If they're prepared to drop _paper_ books in protest at not being able to set _e_ book prices, they should have been quite prepared to require publishers to fix their ebook formatting. Instead they both caved in, and then forced the books which actually followed this beautiful guideline to always render as justified _despite not having implemented hyphenation_. Nor should Adobe have implemented "text-align: justify", given the lack of hyphenation, a user option, and any realistic possibility at all of correcting publisher's mistakes.

Smashwords are as bad you'd expect. Their formatting guide specifically says that some readers will prefer "ragged left", and some will prefer justification - then advises you to use ragged left - because Smashwords doesn't support the "let the e-reader decide" option. The best bit is not that practically no-one listens to this - every book I saw used went for justification instead - it's that _the formatting guide itself_ is justified. The html from FanFiction.Net is better formatted!

Apple may have put in more _technical effort_ than anyone else -- but they endorsed Smashwords output by reselling their books -- and later hacking around it in the reader. In theory their hacks are pretty sound, outside a few corner cases (including tables) -- but because they're hacks, they didn't bother to document what they do and why they exist, and again, _their own formatting guide doesn't follow their own rulings; it forces left alignment_. So they may have done as much damage as they saved their users for existing books. If you run up against these hacks, and then try to diagnose why it doesn't work to spec, you don't find concrete advice on what you're doing wrong and how to avoid problems. What you find are people flaming Apple and explaining how to work around the hacks by using completely bogus markup.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by HarryT

... or you could add an option to Sigil to do it automatically .

Touché.

[DTM]

When I was working with a Palm TX and then an iPod Touch, this was an issue for me, so I tended to prefer the <sp>n-dash<sp> workaround. To avoid the dash at the beginning of a line, I modified that to <nbsp>n-dash<sp>.

<rant>
But then, it really bothered me that I was using incorrect punctuation to acommodate reader software that handled m-dashes improperly. They should break at an m-dash, except at the start of a sentence. If that needs to be a regional setting to acommodate other languages, then the software should do that. Software developers should not be able to get away with, "we know our program doesn't work right, but we'll just let the users figure out a workaround that they can live with."

For the same reason, I've gone back to using plain vanilla <hr> tags in my documents, even though I know ADE won't display them properly. I use small caps even though my Nook won't display them properly. One of the reasons that Internet Explorer remains the worst of the major browsers at rendering standard HTML is that website designers keep accommodating its bugs. If they would just write standard code and let IE fail, Microsoft would have fixed it long ago. The same is true for e-books. When it becomes obvious that ADE is the only ePub software that can't display <hr> correctly, Adobe will fix it. And, for the same reason, B&N will figure out how to display small caps. And everyone will break m-dashes correctly.
</rant>

[cybmole]

i sort of agree, but for now I am compromising & using replace all mdash with space ndash space. easy enough to change it back when the reader softwares improve.

would be even quicker if sigil would open in code view by default and if replace would open in "all files" by default - that would remove 2 steps from the process.

I think, actually a calibre epub to epub conversion with search + replace regex set to the above would fix it in one quick pass.

[JSWolf]

Don't do things wrongly just because the Kindle's parser is broken. If the situation calls for an em dash, use an em-dash. An em-dash is not supposed to have spaces around it. Most readers handle em-dashes correctly as they use ADE.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Don't do things wrongly just because the Kindle's parser is broken. .

but that approach may let me feel smug & correct, but makes for a poor Kindle reading experience

[theducks]

Originally Posted by cybmole

but that approach may let me feel smug & correct, but makes for a poor Kindle reading experience

<rant>
my 2 cents:
By bastardizing a standard to support a non-standard (Amazon, Apple...) forced upon un-suspecting buyers, you are perpetuating their Gorilla tactics.

If the 'content' is not available (or as butt-ugly as it can get because you use all the features that they support incorrectly) in their format ,
then maybe the buyers will put up a howl (or ditch the cr*p product and get a real reading device that supports EPUB properly)
</rant>

[cybmole]

well I checked the kindle forum—searched for mdash—clearly no one there gives a toss about it not parsing properly—it's only us folks here who seem to care....