Next chapter in the saga of poor ebook formatting

[JSWolf]

I've dived into plenty of ePub and some are very easy to modify and some are not as easy. But they are mostly able to be modified using just the CSS.

Once you figure out the CSS enough, it becomes rather easy to fix things you want fixed.

The best way to start is to use Calibre to remove the unused CSS classes. This gets rid of all of those excess classes and leaves just what's being used.

I then go search for the classes used in the XML and fix them as needed. I do dump the <p class="somecrappyclass"> when all you need there is a <p> and fix p in the CSS. Then all the remaining classes are the ones I want to look at to see if they need modifying.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murg

And now we're back to the top of the circle.

But what I'm seeing in ebooks is not the ability to easily change the formatting by changing the CSS, to make changes to the formatting you'd have to make serious and complex changes to the CSS.

The concerns aren't about the role of CSS, or what it is good for. The concerns is that content attributes are being delineated in the CSS and not the HTML.

I edit a great many books and my experience does not match yours. The things I generally wish to change are things like font size, indentation, and paragraph spacing, and that can pretty much always be done with a simple change to the CSS.

Can you give a practical example of the type of problems you're encountering? What have you wanted to change that required the complex edits you describe?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by murg

The concerns aren't about the role of CSS, or what it is good for. The concerns is that content attributes are being delineated in the CSS and not the HTML.

I'm not following at all.

[murg]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm not following at all.

For example, scene breaks.

I've rarely seen them have any actual visible content, which is necessary on an ereader, as the extra spacing can be lost at the top or bottom of a page. The physical book designers know this, which is why they generally use three asterisks to delineate scene breaks at the top or bottom of a page.

Other than as a CSS spacing from the previous or subsequent paragraph, I've rarely seen scene breaks being specially delineated. It's really bad when a blank paragraph is the representation of a scene break.

In my view, scene breaks are content. They usually symbolise either the passage of time, or a change in the point of view. They are something that the author has specially delineated in the source manuscript so that the designers at the publisher know what to do.

An additional aspect of this is that the simpler the HTML is, the easier it is to control the formatting of the ebook on a number of very different devices. That is one of the main purposes of CSS, separating the formatting from the content. What I'm seeing is that the balance of this equation has swung to the formatting side. This is mostly due to the poor quality of the editing tools, and probably has a lot to do with the fact that by the time the book is being formatted, the people doing the formatting are designers, who are primarily interested in the formatting and not the content.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by murg

What I'm seeing is that the balance of this equation has swung to the formatting side. This is mostly due to the poor quality of the editing tools, and probably has a lot to do with the fact that by the time the book is being formatted, the people doing the formatting are designers, who are primarily interested in the formatting and not the content.

I must have lost track of what the argument was about, because I take no real issue with anything you said.

I just remember that there was a definite "direct html formatting is better (for ebooks) than CSS formatting" vibe going on that I wanted to disagree with.

[Joques]

Murg, is there an easy way to add text/graphics/asterisks to scene breaks using CSS? I'm guessing no, or it would have been mentioned already

[GERGE]

I realized something today, Kobobooks fixes their ebooks. I checked some of the badly formatted books I have from Google Play with Kobo, as previews. They are all well formatted.

No wonder I've mostly seen badly formatted books from Google Play.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by GERGE

I realized something today, Kobobooks fixes their ebooks. I checked some of the badly formatted books I have from Google Play with Kobo, as previews. They are all well formatted.

No wonder I've mostly seen badly formatted books from Google Play.

I'd be extremely surprised if Kobo manually edit any of the books submitted to them. All these stores use automated submission systems; the book is created by its publisher, not the bookstore.

[GERGE]

You are most likely correct. But there is a marked difference between previews from Kobo and book I bought from Google Play. The difference is in Kobo's books line-spacing, margin and font-family informations are clearly missing on the body parts. And everyone here should agree that these are the biggest problems we face with epubs.

They probably have an automated process filtering them out while converting submitted epubs to their own kepub.

This is a good way to go about it, I think. But might be too intrusive in some books. But until the publishers learn how to create better epubs, I don't see any problems with this. Especially as we still have access to original Adobe epubs. I checked some books from problematic publishers like WotC, their epubs are still bad while kepubs are good.

PS. They also sometimes add spacing between paragraphs that does not exist in the original epubs they give.

[JSWolf]

It's not a goods thing to strip out line-spacing, font-family, and margin information from the CSS. This changes things. I want to know what the publisher put in even if I have t change it myself.

[GERGE]

Then download the epub from Kobo, they are untouched. Kobo is just trying to fix one of the biggest problems with epubs, ignorant publishers.

[GERGE]

They also fixing books unavailable to download as Adobe ePubs. I had three books like that, I could download them all now as ePubs 3.0 files.

[murg]

Originally Posted by Joques

Murg, is there an easy way to add text/graphics/asterisks to scene breaks using CSS? I'm guessing no, or it would have been mentioned already

Don't know.

I use a paragraph with a number of &mdash; and a CSS class for scene breaks.

[GERGE]

You can do it with a easy hack, but not automated. Only book by book.

Find the pagebreak, insert something else before. Do it by search and replace. If page break is like this:

{pagebreak code}

Replace it with this:

{image code}
{pagebreak code}

Easy to-do, not time consuming either. Like this:

<p class="indent">Paragraph before the break</p>
<div class="dis_img"><img alt="" src="images/random.jpg"/></div>
<p class="nonindent">After the break</p>

Here you would replace <p class="nonindent"> with <div class="dis_img"><img alt="" src="images/random.jpg"/></div>
<p class="nonindent">

Ok?

[Barty]

Originally Posted by Joques

Murg, is there an easy way to add text/graphics/asterisks to scene breaks using CSS? I'm guessing no, or it would have been mentioned already

Yes there is. I don't know how well supported it is but you can use the ::before pseudo element and content property

p.scene-break::before 
{
    content: "***";
    display: block;
    text-align: center
}
p.scene-break { text-indent:0 }

Content can be an img url. No html though. I haven't actually tried this so I don't know if it is correct or how well it is supported.

This seems like /a/ correct and elegant way to do this to me.