Rendering Drop Caps

[pdurrant]

The rendering of drop caps at the start of chapters could do with some improvement. For some reason several books I've read recently have had Drop Caps, and justRead.app's rendering isn't as good as, say, calibre's.

These are all with publishers' style enabled.

Drop Caps is really rather hard to do sensibly, and I don't know what CSS these books have used, but I attach scrambled copies.

For "A Sorceress comes to Call", the two line drop cap is rendered as a raised cap instead.

For "Bones in the Blackout" the three line drop cap looks about the right size, but the baseline is wrong.

For "Foundryside", the three line drop cap is also about the right size, but with the wrong baseline, and the initial letter colour choice isn't obeyed.

I attach screenshots from justRead.app 1.9 and calibre 8.16.2

[petrjahoda]

Hello pdurrant, can you please check it WITHOUT publishers style?

I tested those three and without publishers style the drop caps are correct, but with publishers style they are uncorrect. So looks like, in publishers style, I need to override some settings, so they will became 'partial' publishers style.

[pdurrant]

Turning off publishers style helped in one book with one font. But made it worse in some other cases.

I tried with Hoeffler-Text (my current default), Palatino-Roman and Georgia.

I can provide more screen shots later today if that will help.


I seem to remember from my own attempts to do this with books I’ve created that the renderer needs to take into account some info from the font used. (Which is why I mostly gave up on doing drop caps in my own books).


But it would be very nice if JustRead could handle this tricky bit of typography.

[petrjahoda]

Will look at it and I got it on the todo list.

[petrjahoda]

Hello Paul, so this is fixed and looks like this:

[JSWolf]

Please attach your images because they will expire from the image hosting site.

[petrjahoda]

They are set to 'no expire'.

[petrjahoda]

I added a little more space after that drop cap letter, to make it 'nicer'.
Will be in next update with Calibre Sync and OPDS.

[pdurrant]

Looking good. I’ll try it out when the next versions available.

I’ve converted the images to attachments. It’s not so much that they expire on external sites, as external sites themselves expiring.

[petrjahoda]

Aha, I found out, you can use extended/advanced posting and there is that small button for attachments.
Thank you both for the guiding and I will make it correctly in the future.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by petrjahoda

I added a little more space after that drop cap letter, to make it 'nicer'.
Will be in next update with Calibre Sync and OPDS.

Shouldn't the extra space be part of the CSS and not the app doing it?

[petrjahoda]

Hi JSWolf, what CSS do you mean?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by petrjahoda

Hi JSWolf, what CSS do you mean?

The eBook's CSS.

[petrjahoda]

Oh, I understand.
That would be the perfect solution for this, but in last 4 months I saw more than 'a lot of' epub files with broken/unproper CSS. So when there is a possibility to improve something, without breaking anything, I will improve it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by petrjahoda

Oh, I understand.
That would be the perfect solution for this, but in last 4 months I saw more than 'a lot of' epub files with broken/unproper CSS. So when there is a possibility to improve something, without breaking anything, I will improve it.

But it will break something because it's going to go against the eBook's CSS. If the CSS has a working dropcap, you'll mess that up. If the dropcap is broken, it's broken and you should not try to fix it.