The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Buckaroo

I haven't read the entire 250-page thread, so this has almost certainly been brought up before, but just in case: There is a spot in Hell reserved for whoever decided that it is now an acceptable formatting convention to denote paragraph breaks with an empty line space rather than with an indent. I never, ever saw this before my reading became primarily e-books. Sure, I can change it in Calibre, but not without the risk of damaging other formatting within the book - i.e. section breaks that *also* use blank lines. And in any case, I shouldn't *have* to.

That's a rather common screw-up. eBooks should not have paragraph spaces of a full line. I have seen some that use a .3em space between paragraphs and I still don't like them but I understand them as a middle-ground for some.

Another issue I see is the line-height. That should never be put in the main text.

There is a place in Hell for eBook designers who put in paragraph spaces and/or line-height as well as those that waste a really stupid amount of space with a chapter header.. Also that place is reserved for whoever decided that mode Kindle eBooks should use a 7% text indent. And those that use Vellum have their one special place. As well as though that embed fonts that don't work on eInk and in some cases not even on LCD or OLED. And we get those that decide to make the base font x-small or some stupidly small font size. And I'll end here with footnotes where the designer decides it's OK to make the touch point a microscopic size so we can easily miss it by not seeing it or depending on the prgbram being used, be unable able to tap on it. There are things to get eBooks designers in this special place but that's more then enough for now.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Yep. That's not good. I know some authors do things like Patreon, anthologies, other websites, graphic novels, etc.

I actually hate graphic novels that are part of a series that are supposed to be novels and/or short stories.

FWIW, it's forbidden to link to Patreon on AO3. Its to do with AO3 being strictly non-commercial (more).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

Why is CSS so complicated? I thought the idea of it was to make formatting of HTML documents simple and consistent. I've looked at CSS and it seems overly complicated and confusing with a syntax that is different from HTML.

Part of the problem is not that the CSS is too complicated. It's that every time someone adds a class to the CSS, it gets added to master CSS. which just gets bigger and bigger. They never trim out the unused classes. I've see (in some cases) more then 100 unused classes.

If you want to see overly complicated CSS that has absolutely ZERO reason to be complicated at all is Standard EBooks. Their CSS actually is some of the worst. And the worst part is they do it on purpose just because they can. They don't care.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

This assumes that the CSS is sane. Buckaroo's example is CSS where potentially the same method is used for both paragraph skips and scene breaks, in which case blindly converting line skips to indents will destroy scene breaks. Editing complex and/or nutty CSS can be a ton of work.

I have read of some complaining where if you use the conversion calibre feature to remove extra line-spaces, you also remove section breaks.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Because everyone thinks their way is best, and so we have a thousand different ways to accomplish something.

Not everyone. I know for sure my way is not overly complicated. Is it the best? Maybe not. But is the rule of KISS being followed. Yes it is. I make my code as ePub2 compatible as possible. Then I know it will work in more cases then not.

I will sometimes do something that's not ePub2 compatible and read the eBook as KePub on my Kobo. But i can do the formatting with ePub2 compatible code, I will.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

HTML is used for creating web pages. CSS is used to define how the the pages look. Totally different tasks.

To me, the syntax of CSS is not that confusing though as it has been added to in the different version, it has gotten more complex. But then if you look at how HTML has changed over the years, it's not that much better. Compare the simplicity of Tim Berners-Lee's first web page to a modern web page with it's masses of code attempting to make a web page look somewhat the same across multiple browsers on multiple display devices using HTML5.

That website is a thing of beauty in it's simplicity and functionality.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

In most books there is a difference between the code for paragraph spacing and the code for section breaks. It will be a ton of work only if there is no difference between the two at all, but that's rare.

If there is actually no difference at all between the CSS, then the work to do is very little, since there is no way to tell what is just two paragraphs next to each other, and what is a "section break". Just assume that there are no section breaks (which there aren't, because there is no difference in the way a "section break" is rendered by the CSS) and move on.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have read of some complaining where if you use the conversion calibre feature to remove extra line-spaces, you also remove section breaks.

This is why when I create my own ebooks using LibreOffice I don't insert extra line spaces via hard returns or line breaks, and I make Section Breaks their own paragraph style. If I need more space between the paragraphs I increase the space via the paragraph style. Now I format everything via styles, with the exception of small bits of text (like making words bold/italics).

I've used the EPUB conversion tool in LibreOffice and in Calibre and the results have not been good. The resulting ebooks have formatting that doesn't match the formatting of the original, such as double spaced text where it's supposed to be single spaced, first-line indents where they weren't supposed to be, different text sizes with paragraphs that are supposed to the same size, and section breaks missing the horizontal rule that was in the original. However, when I render the same ebooks as PDFs they are perfect, looking exactly as intended.

[DNSB]

Whereas I find the using either LibreOffice and saving as docx or using Microsoft Word and saving as docx gives me excellent results from calibre. The main difference is likely that I use styles that have been tweaked for that purpose. I've also used the docx import plugin in Sigil where I did have to input the custom style map but after that bit of pain, the results are pretty damn good.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

This is why when I create my own ebooks using LibreOffice I don't insert extra line spaces via hard returns or line breaks, and I make Section Breaks their own paragraph style. If I need more space between the paragraphs I increase the space via the paragraph style. Now I format everything via styles, with the exception of small bits of text (like making words bold/italics).

I've used the EPUB conversion tool in LibreOffice and in Calibre and the results have not been good. The resulting ebooks have formatting that doesn't match the formatting of the original, such as double spaced text where it's supposed to be single spaced, first-line indents where they weren't supposed to be, different text sizes with paragraphs that are supposed to the same size, and section breaks missing the horizontal rule that was in the original. However, when I render the same ebooks as PDFs they are perfect, looking exactly as intended.

If you do decide to use space as a section break, do not use a margin. using padding. All you need to use is the following..

.sectionbreak {
  padding-top: 1.5em;
  text-indent: 0;
}

That will be the class for the paragraph under the section break space. The reason for padding is that if the section break falls at the bottom or top of the page, the space could be swallowed. But the padding should stay in tact.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Of course I didn't mean blindly converting anything. In most books there is a difference between the code for paragraph spacing and the code for section breaks. It will be a ton of work only if there is no difference between the two at all, but that's rare.

Speaking of nutty css, I just finished editing one of the worst examples of this. I have no idea how they formatted the book (just typing everything in by hand, without using any styles or rules?), because there were several hundred different rules for ordinary paragraphs, section breaks, blockquotes and so on - each one had slightly different margins (for example, one paragraph had a bottom margin 5pt, another 6pt; a blockquote had left and right margins 15pt, another 16pt, still another 15pt left and 20pt right, etc. etc. A total madhouse), so they had to be edited manually one by one, no bulk search/replace or regex. Took me two days. Grrr.

I hear you. I decided to clean up a quite old epub (2010) that I'd never read (a freebie), but one I've always meant to read. Well, Calibre was having a hard time with it, i.e. really slow. So I went in, looked at the code and there was a style set up in the head in each and every HTML file. And that style file consisted of about 3 zillion or so font declarations. It was, I kid you not, 6200+ lines of completely unnecessary code! In every blamed HTML file, all 28 of them! The ebook did not have any embedded fonts whatsoever. It looked like someone had just decided to reference every dang font on their machine when they made the ebook. I'd never heard of half the fonts. Needless to say, that was a head-shaker!

And not terribly fun to get rid of, since I couldn't select the whole mess for find/replace. No blame to Calibre, who'd think you'd ever need to do something like that? With some experimentation, I was finally able to select about 500 lines of the file for find/replace, Calibre could handle that OK and I got it done, 500 lines at a whack. Hopefully I'll actually enjoy the book....

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by graycyn

I hear you. I decided to clean up a quite old epub (2010) that I'd never read (a freebie), but one I've always meant to read. Well, Calibre was having a hard time with it, i.e. really slow. So I went in, looked at the code and there was a style set up in the head in each and every HTML file. And that style file consisted of about 3 zillion or so font declarations. It was, I kid you not, 6200+ lines of completely unnecessary code! In every blamed HTML file, all 28 of them! The ebook did not have any embedded fonts whatsoever. It looked like someone had just decided to reference every dang font on their machine when they made the ebook. I'd never heard of half the fonts. Needless to say, that was a head-shaker!

And not terribly fun to get rid of, since I couldn't select the whole mess for find/replace. No blame to Calibre, who'd think you'd ever need to do something like that? With some experimentation, I was finally able to select about 500 lines of the file for find/replace, Calibre could handle that OK and I got it done, 500 lines at a whack. Hopefully I'll actually enjoy the book....

Wow! What a heck of an eBook. Even if you don't like it, you can hold your head up high and say..."I tamed the beast!".

I once bought an eBook from Simon & Schuster. The CSS was broken. I was unable to find how to return it. I had a dive into the code and was able to fix it.

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Wow! What a heck of an eBook. Even if you don't like it, you can hold your head up high and say..."I tamed the beast!".

I once bought an eBook from Simon & Schuster. The CSS was broken. I was unable to find how to return it. I had a dive into the code and was able to fix it.

I have to admit, when I saw all that code (some 174,000 extra lines, all in all), I couldn't help but think how horrified you in particular would be, LOL!

I've never seen anything like that before, and I've seen some pretty bad ebooks. Once I got rid of all those font declarations, the actual book wasn't too bad to clean up. No wonder Calibre was poking along while I was running the error check though....

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by graycyn

I have to admit, when I saw all that code (some 174,000 extra lines, all in all), I couldn't help but think how horrified you in particular would be, LOL!

I've never seen anything like that before, and I've seen some pretty bad ebooks. Once I got rid of all those font declarations, the actual book wasn't too bad to clean up. No wonder Calibre was poking along while I was running the error check though....

I bet removing extra CSS with calibre removed a lot of excess crud.

[DrNefario]

I just bought book 3 in a series. It's great that the series is finally available as ebooks in my country, but the recent editions are republished under the author's new, more successful pen-name. When I bought the first two, years ago, they were in her original name.

I guess that's always been a thing - the Richard Bachman books being republished as by Stephen King, etc - but it's the first time it's happened to me in the middle of a series.