The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

My most recent pain point with styling to get italics was the following from a commercial e-book with Dutton as the original hardcover publisher:

<style>
.cs {
  font-style: italics;
}
.plain {
  font-style: normal;
}
</style>

<p class="somepara cs"><span class="plain">“We </span>need <span class="plain"> you"</span></p>

Yes, any paragraph where any word should be italicized (either through <em> or <i>) got styled as "italicize the whole thing and add exceptions for non-italic text".

Talk about an nightmare for accessibility.

What the hell? Was this "body" text inside a letter or some other reason (or pseudo-reason) that it was italicized in the main and made "regular" for that text meant to be emphasized? That's...horrible.

Hitch

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Hitch

What the hell? Was this "body" text inside a letter or some other reason (or pseudo-reason) that it was italicized in the main and made "regular" for that text meant to be emphasized? That's...horrible.

Hitch

Happens often enough with dream sequences, memories, flashbacks et al. To make it separate from the present.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Happens often enough with dream sequences, memories, flashbacks et al. To make it separate from the present.

Yes, of course, agreed but for some reason, I inferred that @nabsltd meant used throughout. Dunno why. Bad enough when just scattered hither and yon.

Hitch

[DNSB]

I've seen one book where the body style included italic. Almost every other style element added font-style: normal;.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I only have very fuzzy memories (the book honestly gave me a headache), but Dune had a somewhat-vague Butlerian Jihad to explain the lack of computers.

It was

'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.'

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Hitch

What the hell? Was this "body" text inside a letter or some other reason (or pseudo-reason) that it was italicized in the main and made "regular" for that text meant to be emphasized? That's...horrible.

If a paragraph included something that needed to be shown in italics, it got the treatment demonstrated. I suspect it started out as you noted, but definitely expanded from there.

There were paragraphs that were memories/letters/etc. that had no "plain" text and used the "cs" class (as a side note, what would make somebody use "cs" to mean "italic" or "emphasized"?) to make the whole thing italic. Then there were others where one sentence was the memory, with the rest styled with "plain". Then, there were a few with a single word not styled as "plain".

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

If a paragraph included something that needed to be shown in italics, it got the treatment demonstrated. I suspect it started out as you noted, but definitely expanded from there.

There were paragraphs that were memories/letters/etc. that had no "plain" text and used the "cs" class (as a side note, what would make somebody use "cs" to mean "italic" or "emphasized"?) to make the whole thing italic. Then there were others where one sentence was the memory, with the rest styled with "plain". Then, there were a few with a single word not styled as "plain".

Ooookay, now we can have the Great MR "cs" contest. What can CS mean???? Come on, gang. Great Minds, assemble!

Hitch

[hildea]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Ooookay, now we can have the Great MR "cs" contest. What can CS mean???? Come on, gang. Great Minds, assemble!

Hitch

Complicated sentences
Cool speech
Creepy stuff
Carnivorous sheep

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Ooookay, now we can have the Great MR "cs" contest. What can CS mean???? Come on, gang. Great Minds, assemble!

Hitch

crappy shite

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Hitch

What can CS mean????

Cephalopod sentience

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Ooookay, now we can have the Great MR "cs" contest. What can CS mean???? Come on, gang. Great Minds, assemble!

Hitch

Classic Stupidity

[Martinoptic]

Can’t Sleep for worrying about this?

[JSWolf]

One vent/rant is why do the big publishers have no clue how to make properly formatted eBooks?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One vent/rant is why do the big publishers have no clue how to make properly formatted eBooks?

The conclusion that I reached a while back is that they still haven't realized that eBooks are different from pBooks and eBooks need different formatting to look good. The fixation that if it looks good as a pBook, it's going to look good as an eBook. The people reading ebooks on different devices will not change fonts, font size, line spacing, margins, etc.

Perhaps that other than indie authors, print is still the majority of book sales is part of the reason. Why spend more of your resources on less than 20% of your business.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

The conclusion that I reached a while back is that they still haven't realized that eBooks are different from pBooks and eBooks need different formatting to look good. The fixation that if it looks good as a pBook, it's going to look good as an eBook. The people reading ebooks on different devices will not change fonts, font size, line spacing, margins, etc.

Perhaps that other than indie authors, print is still the majority of book sales is part of the reason. Why spend more of your resources on less than 20% of your business.

As long as a programs as bad as Vellum or Kindle Create aren't used, it's rather easy to fix the formatting. So there's no real reason not to deliver well formatted eBooks. I'd love a job for one of the big publishers doing proper formatting of their eBooks.