Next chapter in the saga of poor ebook formatting

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by GERGE

I thought Nook used RMSDK?

It does. Not sure which version it's using or how up to date it is.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

What justification is there for specifying one in % and the other in px?

None that I know of. I was only commenting on settings that result in different left/right margin sizes; regardless of the units of measure used. I've seen many that were zero on the right and "something" on the left.

I don't really like any of my screen real-estate being hijacked by left/right "page" margins (considering that they usually get added to whatever left/right margins the reading app/device already has assigned), but I could at least live with them if they were equal (strictly talking about "normal" body margins here, not special, indented/blockquoted sections).

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by GERGE

All WotC books are like that. I opened a topic about it now at the Candlekeep.

???

Never noticed it, but it could be because I use Modify Epub, which rips out all body margins and sets them to 5px.

WotC books are (normally) very well formatted.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by GERGE

I thought Nook used RMSDK?

It does. But nook uses a customized version that actually doesn't work all that well. I have a nook STR and the RMDSK on the STR is lousy.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

The book I'm reading now, published by Open Road Media, has the body margins set like this:

body
{
margin-left:1.5%;
margin-right:20px;
}

So if you happen to be reading on a device with a horizontal resolution of about 1333px then you'll get nice even 20px left/right margins, but if your device has a horizontal resolution of anything other than about 1333px, then one margin will be bigger than the other.

I've seen left/right margins of 10%. That's just stupid (IMHO). I've also seen margin made such that the right margin is larger to accommodate possible page numbers in the right margin.

[murg]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

What justification is there for specifying one in % and the other in px?

None.

Probably done by a automated process. Somehow the left margin got set one way on the screen, and right margin another. Then when they converted to epub (or whatever), the application happily wrote what it thought the users wanted.

The thing that gets me is that the publishers usually take a fair bit of effort to get the physical book formatting right, but they're quite happy to let the ebooks be formatted in whatever poor way the application outputs the ebook.