indent control

[ldolse]

Originally Posted by cybmole

could you see what happens with your code AND use an epub with with a specific text-indent 0 in its main calibre style within the style sheet, to see if you get the same override issues as I did please.

I'll do this if I find some time and a good example, not going to go out of my way digging through my library on this one.

Originally Posted by cybmole

i don't have an intuitive sense of own an x% indent cxompares to a number of ems in dent. why, may i ask, do you prefer to use % settings , and are they mobi-compatible.

3% scales with the device - it looks like the expected 'typical' width on a kindle sized device, but if I'm using my mobile phone as a backup that same width is too much if specified in em - this way the indent on the phone is much smaller than the indent on the Sony and does the right thing for the screen real-estate.


I did a bit of testing to decide that .3 em of space seemed 'about right' to me. Didn't take a lot of effort - easier to use Sigil and ADE to quickly make/compare changes to a stylesheet, then feed that back into Calibre.

[cybmole]

thanks - don't bother testing the override "feature" as i blieve the posted explanation of cascading stylesheets rules covers it OK

new question. I'm stumpted on how to apply the indent & line spacing prefs in bulk.

i thought a 2 stage solution would work so I've backed up my library & then have converted all epub to epub with remove blank lines + set indent to 1em set in prefs.

I reckoned that would be a good 1st step & it has worked as expected.

for step 2, I was then hopeful that another epub to epub pass, this time with blank lines unchecked and with a short version of your prefs in my extra css
p {margin-top: 0.3em ; margin-bottom: 0.3em}
would do the trick, but it has not had any effect.

so i must be doing something wrong here, if it worked for you -?

maybe my step 1 ( remove line spaces) has stuffed the stylsheets with explicit zeros ? is that how "remove blank lines" works ?.

I think that is what has happened, so now it's like with the text-indent issue. the extra css will not override the stylesheet specifics, even with the !important tag

[ldolse]

I never use the remove blank lines feature in Look and Feel - it's too big a hammer, and as you've noticed it can make things difficult later. I always use extra css alone, not sure why you need the two-step approach...

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by ldolse

I never use the remove blank lines feature in Look and Feel - it's too big a hammer, and as you've noticed it can make things difficult later. I always use extra css alone, not sure why you need the two-step approach...

believe it not i thought 2 step would be safer i.e. it would get all my books to the same standard base line format ( which actually is usable as-is). then I'd take a snapshot backup & proceed with more tweaking.

it never occurred to me that step 2 would fail on me. i knew that some books had been hand-changed to have no indents & to have different line spacings as per my previous attempts to fins my ideal style so i thought let's get them all looking the same by standardizing the indent & taking out the blanks. ( also I knew that was reversible - via the add blank lines option )

I guess its time to accept it & move on, I can easily add the .3 em spacing to any book that I am about to start reading. I had a desire to retro apply it to books read to date but unless an enhancement to calibre is released to take care of it, that will have to wait. I cannot think of another slick way to bulk change all the books stylesheets, as there will be lots of calibre-nn & other styles in them.