Adequacy of EPUB?

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

>You'll get what I get: people who type like they're using a typewriter, hitting "enter" at the end of each LINE, not paragraph.

I don't blame them for that. I still miss the DING! that the little bell would make when the carriage was five characters from the end of the line, as if Mr Remington and Mr Rand were cheering my creation of yet another line of glorious prose.

Knock yourself out.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Simply set your desired paragraph defaults in the CSS. Eg;

.p {
    text-indent: 1.5em;
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0
}

What's hard about that? It has the huge benefit over manually indenting each paragraph separately that, should you later decide that you want a different indentation of a different paragraph spacing, you only have to edit it in one place, and your whole book will change to match the settings. Immensely easier that formatting each paragraph individually.

Why do you find it to be a "major task"?

The impression I've gotten of CSS is that it makes even the simplest formatting very complicated, especially if you include a great deal of formatting (which I've found in my experience with styles in word processing which often becomes a bit of work to get my documents formatted correctly). Part of the reason for that impression is that it seems that CSS wasn't been properly implemented in some web browsers and didn't work as it should have (although that is likely no longer the case).

But I must admit that the code you included above is very simple indeed, and if all CSS coding is that easy then it should be the way to go...as long as it works consistently. I wonder if an option could be offered in ereaders where you make a CSS in your ereader and all ebooks are formatted in accordance with that CSS, overriding any CSS elements in the ebook itself.

[HarryT]

There's generally a huge difference in terms of complexity between hand-written CSS and machine-generated CSS, such as would be output from a program like Word or Adobe InDesign: in the latter case you'd get dozens of styles and attributes output which would ensure that your finished book looked as close as possible to the way you'd designed it.

But if (as I am) you're happy to use device defaults for font selections, text size, etc, CSS can be simple and clean. There really are immense benefits to separating the formatting from the semantic content of the book, because it puts all the formatting specification together in one place, rather than having to go through the entire book and change things in multiple places.

[dickloraine]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I wonder if an option could be offered in ereaders where you make a CSS in your ereader and all ebooks are formatted in accordance with that CSS, overriding any CSS elements in the ebook itself.

That's part of what is discussed here. Since there are no definitions and no rules how to declare what things are, what you ask for is only possible in a disruptive way. Since you don't know how classes are named, you could only overwrite the basic things, like p, h etc. Of course a little more is possible with p+p, p+h etc. In fact many readers do it this way. Changing for example font-size in the body.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

The impression I've gotten of CSS is that it makes even the simplest formatting very complicated, especially if you include a great deal of formatting (which I've found in my experience with styles in word processing which often becomes a bit of work to get my documents formatted correctly). Part of the reason for that impression is that it seems that CSS wasn't been properly implemented in some web browsers and didn't work as it should have (although that is likely no longer the case).

Well...if you use the Styles pane/option in your Word processor consistently, and correctly, you really ought not to have issues when the book is being formatted as a book, unless what you've done isn't "doable" in eBooks--which happens. For example, we get a lot of chapter heads in which a client has used a "text effect" from Word, like 3-D or what-have-you. We don't have the capability to put that particular CSS into a MOBI for Kindle. Or text floating over an image; again, if you have to deal with the less-advanced Amazon devices, you can't do that, not AS text-floating-over-an-image. Other than that, it really ought not be difficult.

But I must admit that the code you included above is very simple indeed, and if all CSS coding is that easy then it should be the way to go...as long as it works consistently. I wonder if an option could be offered in ereaders where you make a CSS in your ereader and all ebooks are formatted in accordance with that CSS, overriding any CSS elements in the ebook itself.

Basically, all good CSS looks like that. There are scads of crap CSS that is put out by word-processors with "one-button" export--Word, OO, LO, Scrivener, PAGES (OM*G, Pages' output is just horrid); and of course layout programs like INDD can output some horrific CSS if it's being used by a newb. I've seen things like, "char-span-override-301," in which 301 is the incremental number of the character style overrides. Now, that's bad.

What word processor or...? are you using, when you are styling your book?

Vis-a-vis overrides: I can tell you that this is a massive headache for folks like me. For example, consider the Drop cap, which isn't hard to do in print. It's not hard to do if you have sufficient control in eBooks. But it's heavily dependent upon you having control over the font, and the vertical height of the element (or drop) and the line-height. The MOMENT that a reader puts that book into a software reader that allows them to override any of that, even merely the font, the (appearance of the) book goes to hell.

So, I don't object to the idea in principle, at all, but I surely do in practice. If eReaders would all allow media-queries, that could respond to that type of overriding, that would be great; but on the other hand, nobody could EVER figure out, in advance, all the possible permutations of the possible overrides, so...I'm blowing smoke out of my keister.

<rant on...>

And really, it's kind of...wish-list-y. After all, it's not like folks are running around making changes to their print books, are they? This is akin to the obsession with reporting typos in books now and expecting them to be fixed damn skippy--an idea that didn't even EXIST even 10 years ago. It would be a cold day in hell before some reader would send Random House an email or letter saying "oh, I found this typo in print Book X," and actually expect Random House to REISSUE the damn book, fixing the typo. But now? Now they expect authors and publishers to "hop to." I think it's outrageous behavior, myself.

In a way, while some of it is people being genuinely helpful, a larger part of it is people showing off what they perceive as their superior knowledge, and expecting the publisher to jump on it, to acknowledge how valuable their contribution was, by fixing it immediately. It's a form of self-validation and self/instant gratification.

Don't say it isn't--I, for one, have seen far too many of their love notes to Amazon, sending in, for example, two typos--one a Brit spelling, mind you, so not a typo--in a 250K word (yes, two hundred and fifty thousand words) novel that was previously trade-pubbed. That's not helpful--that's being insufferably precious.

</rant off>


Hitch

[JSWolf]

In Word, don't use the toolbar to format. use styles. Then once you save as filtered HTML, you will find it's a lot neater to clean up than it would be otherwise.

[dickloraine]

There is one thing I wished that could be as easily changed as font sizes: The margin and indentation of the main paragraph. In fiction I hate that style which has blank space between paragraphs. It is seldom used in fiction, but I stumble over it often enough. Nearly as irritating are those publishers who insert a tiny margin between paragraphs. And then there are the people who love this style. So changing between them would be quite nice. Oh, and strangly I prefer no indentation and a margin sometimes in non-fiction. That's a feature I would like. But of course using calibre or sigil can fix this, it is just tedious to do.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by dickloraine

There is one thing I wished that could be as easily changed as font sizes: The margin and indentation of the main paragraph. In fiction I hate that style which has blank space between paragraphs. It is seldom used in fiction, but I stumble over it often enough. Nearly as irritating are those publishers who insert a tiny margin between paragraphs. And then there are the people who love this style. So changing between them would be quite nice. Oh, and strangly I prefer no indentation and a margin sometimes in non-fiction. That's a feature I would like. But of course using calibre or sigil can fix this, it is just tedious to do.

Well...if they're done correctly, it should not be that tedious. You can see how you can't, on the devices, really make it "push-button," as most fiction books will have at least 3 paragraph styles (first--the first paragraph of a chapter, usually flush-left; p, the typical first-line indent, and for ours, at least, p.copyright, which is a flush-left with no space between, so you can build copyright pages and others like that where the no-space between, no indentation can be used for whatever reasons), and automating that would be beyond difficult, right?

Assuming you had something like that--3 styles, or even 5-6, all you have to do is modify them, and you should have what you want. Of course--that assumes that the builder made it correctly. If it's a badly-crafted book, of course...yeah, that would be beyond tedious.Like making a book from a crappy source file the first-time through.

(posted mostly for the benefit of the noobs who may come along and read this rather lengthy thread!)

Hitch

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In Word, don't use the toolbar to format. use styles. Then once you save as filtered HTML, you will find it's a lot neater to clean up than it would be otherwise.

Jon:

For the typical text enhancement--bold, italic, underline (oy, oy, oy!!), using the toolbar will insert the html commands of b, i and u. As discussed on another thread, those may need to be regexed into conforming code for ePUBcheck. But they don't create that "crap" that we're all bitching about.

What most people do that causes issues is using the tab and other keyboard keys, that causes those infamous crap spans. When they highlight a section of text, and then apply direct formatting for font sizes, colors, and font. THAT will always cause issues. Using the tab key to try to force a blockquote, ditto. For those, abalooley, Styles should be created and used appropriately.

Hitch

[Sarmat89]

but the NAMING conventions--just like XML schema--stay the same.

Your naming conventions are your own—they are meaningless outside your book. When the element roles are defined by standards, there is ONE CSS applicable to ALL books.

You persist in trying to argue that XML is better for the BOOKS, which is a losing argument, when all you care about is categorization and searching on metadata and semantics.

It enhances the quality of books by explicitly defining the structure and styling of book elements, and not leaving the end user at mercy of the book producer and their skills.

will somehow improve bookmaking ITSELF.

No one cares about bookmakers. The new format will enhance the end user experience, as well as the distributor experience.
It seems there is a conflict of interest between you and readers, that makes you somewhat deaf to the voice of reason.

the difference between one set of tags and another is moot.

Wrong. Random classes need to be styled explicitly, and cannot be customized by user. Predefined tags can be styled and formatted by both the reader and the user, and they allow user to have the same experience between different books. Is that a bad thing in your opinion?

One last point: you keep ignoring the fact that DocBook WAS here. It came, and it went.

We don't need DocBook. We need a Book format, tailored for fiction and non-fiction.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Your naming conventions are your own—they are meaningless outside your book. When the element roles are defined by standards, there is ONE CSS applicable to ALL books.

Since the standard cannot define everything (or else it would only be a standard for a subset of books), it must provide some placeholder elements for custom use, the equivalent the XHTML's <div> and <span>. Once you have them, the hell's gates are open and you can count on users and publishers indiscriminately using <div> and <span> to suit their needs, rather than all the carefully and meaningfully defined semantic markup.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

Your naming conventions are your own—they are meaningless outside your book. When the element roles are defined by standards, there is ONE CSS applicable to ALL books.
It enhances the quality of books by explicitly defining the structure and styling of book elements, and not leaving the end user at mercy of the book producer and their skills.

So that we have a meaningful basis for discussion, can you upload or provide a link to the standard that you're proposing, please?

[Sarmat89]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Since the standard cannot define everything (or else it would only be a standard for a subset of books), it must provide some placeholder elements for custom use

Not at all—95% of e-books (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama) can be described in a small number of terms, and features that the other 5% use are not supported by 75% of readers/devices.

I wonder what kind of formatting, which a simple XML schema cannot describe is used by local bookmakers.

[Jellby]

So your "ideal" format is only for that 95%? Anything out of the ordinary doesn't fit in your format?

[doubleshuffle]

Originally Posted by Sarmat89

I wonder what kind of formatting, which a simple XML schema cannot describe is used by local bookmakers.

Now here's a job for you: Download a few sample books from each of the local bookmakers and find out.