Quotes and blockquote

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Very well said.

Well, thanks. Mostly, I was speaking for those who will read this later. Newbies and the like. Everybody here already knows all this stuff.

Hitch

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Lolz!!! Sorry I forgot to put the sarcasm emoji on that last sentence. (fixed now) My intent was to head off the argument against by those who will nay-say my syntactic CDO (OCD in the proper alphabetic order).

Dahlink:

Nozzing I said was directed at you, snookums Turtle. Well and truly. I was just...yammering. Probably in an utterly unneeded fashion.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

What I would like to do is ask some of these eBook makers for the big publishers and ask them why they do things so wrong.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I would like to do is ask some of these eBook makers for the big publishers and ask them why they do things so wrong.

Because they had someone create guidelines / procedures / standards for ebook creation at some point, and it costs money and time to change them.

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Because they had someone create guidelines / procedures / standards for ebook creation at some point, and it costs money and time to change them.

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Well, they need to change them. They don't work well enough.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Well, they need to change them. They don't work well enough.

Some of the code is pretty ugly but other than us code geeks, how many people ever look at the code?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Some of the code is pretty ugly but other than us code geeks, how many people ever look at the code?

What I'd like to know is how many people would like better formatted eBooks.

The problem is the way they make eBooks, they don't do the formatting all that well. They don't get it.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I'd like to know is how many people would like better formatted eBooks.

The problem is the way they make eBooks, they don't do the formatting all that well. They don't get it.

Jon, I love ya, but they don't care. Hell, my authors don't--they just want their eBook readable. To them, it doesn't really matter if someone does an automatic job using Calibre, or if we hand-code them. They only see what's on the surface, so it's fair, really, that that's what they care about. Why should they care if we code a blockquote as a blockquote or a span or a div?

We can't expect them to demand or care about what they cannot see, or understand as if they were writing HTML, they'd DIY. Right? We need to be fair about how we view them, no?

Hitch

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I'd like to know is how many people would like better formatted eBooks.

The problem is the way they make eBooks, they don't do the formatting all that well. They don't get it.

The problem for me is that when I format an ebook so it looks pretty damn near perfect on one renderer then test it on another renderer and it looks like crap. So most ebooks are aimed at being readable on multiple renderers—as Voltaire put it, "Le meglio è l'inimico del bene".

I won't even get into the joys of epub2, epub3, mobi, KF8, KFX, etc. and their effect on how an ebook renders.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Jon, I love ya, but they don't care. Hell, my authors don't--they just want their eBook readable. To them, it doesn't really matter if someone does an automatic job using Calibre, or if we hand-code them. They only see what's on the surface, so it's fair, really, that that's what they care about. Why should they care if we code a blockquote as a blockquote or a span or a div?

We can't expect them to demand or care about what they cannot see, or understand as if they were writing HTML, they'd DIY. Right? We need to be fair about how we view them, no?

Hitch

True, most people don't care about the code under the hood. But they should care about the poor formatting in a lot of eBooks.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

True, most people don't care about the code under the hood. But they should care about the poor formatting in a lot of eBooks.

Yes, but JON. What you think of as poor formatting ("eeek, this person used an empty paragraph and not a margin!") is not what they think of as poor formatting. They only care about what they can SEE and what does or doesn't affect how their book renders in Kindles, Nooks, Kobos and so on and so forth.

That's all. You can't expect them to know what you know, or care about what you care about. It's like if you go to the racetrack and you see a stunning horse. You may say to the person standing next to you, "what a beauty! What a fantastic-looking animal!" and that person, were she me, might say "well, that's all well and good but she has a problem in her stifle, and a bowed tendon and..."

You look and see a gorgeous horse. I look and see an expensive animal that will eat a ton of hay and cost me the earth in vet bills. You can't expect authors or even publishers to care about what we, those of us working in the weeds, care about. And much of what we argue about here--well and truly--doesn't actually matter. It only matters if you want everything to be "correct," rather than whether or not it's functional.

And therein lies the rub. You tend to want things to be semantically correct, or, in some cases, Correct According to Jon--but done incorrectly, the book still works and still functions as it ought. You'll never find a publisher that will hair-split to that degree--they simply won't. All they care about is the latter, not the World According to Jon. Or the World According to Me, for that matter.

Yes, yes, I know, they should all listen to me, but shockingly--they don't. They want the book to look nice and work/function, for the least amount of money. Given that this is, after all, a commercial undertaking, it's hard to blame them.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, but JON. What you think of as poor formatting ("eeek, this person used an empty paragraph and not a margin!") is not what they think of as poor formatting. They only care about what they can SEE and what does or doesn't affect how their book renders in Kindles, Nooks, Kobos and so on and so forth.

The reason I have a go at the code because what I can SEE is not good in moist cases. Excessive margins, excessive space for the chapter header, paragraph spaces, line height too large, font sizes that are too small, blockquotes (or simulated) with too wide margins, embedded fonts that I don't like, sometimes left justified, sans-serif body text, generic covers or too small covers, and other things. This is what I can see before digging into the code.

Yes, yes, I know, they should all listen to me, but shockingly--they don't. They want the book to look nice and work/function, for the least amount of money. Given that this is, after all, a commercial undertaking, it's hard to blame them.

It's quite easy to blame them. If they had a good work ethic, they'd do it well enough and it would be not difficult to do or take too long.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The reason I have a go at the code because what I can SEE is not good in moist cases. Excessive margins, excessive space for the chapter header, paragraph spaces, line height too large, font sizes that are too small, blockquotes (or simulated) with too wide margins, embedded fonts that I don't like, sometimes left justified, sans-serif body text, generic covers or too small covers, and other things. This is what I can see before digging into the code.

Yes, but Jon, again, much of that is what you individually and personally don't like. Excessive margins, excessivespace for the chapter header, (those are your definitions, not necessarily the publisher's); line-height "too large" (again, your feeling about it) and all that. Embedded fonts that--you even say it--that you don't like. All these things are mostly your personal preferences.

That's individual. Those are yours. It's not mine or Bob's or Fred's or Nancy's. For example, this past two years, I've run into several customers that hate, hate hyphenation. They hate it, say that they have a hard time reading it, so they don't want it for their print books. But they want justification, which means rivers of white. Now, I hate how that looks, but these projects are their books, not mine. That's their preference, versus mine and probably, versus yours. (Or, don't get me started on ragged right for print versus justified!)

I'm not arguing with you, Jon, per se, but you need to recognize that what you like isn't the industry standard--if the industry indeed had a standard (which it really doesn't).

You do what you do--you fix or change the ePUBs to suit yourself and that's great, but all the rest of us can do is make the eBooks clear to use and read; name things clearly, use alt tags, do all that and within reason, follow the customer's preferences. I wish I didn't have to use certain fonts as accent fonts, but you know the Midas Rules. That's just how it is. Publishing-wise, especially around eBooks, formatting is still, in many ways, the Wild Wild West.

It's quite easy to blame them. If they had a good work ethic, they'd do it well enough and it would be not difficult to do or take too long.

No, now you're just being you. They're writers, not formatters.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

@Hitch, there are some things that pBooks do that a lot of eBooks don't do. For example, I don't know of any novels that have paragraph spaces.

Embedded fonts can be a problem. For a Kindle they just make the eBooks larger with no benefit as most people won't even know they exist. Also for other Readers, the embedded fonts may not be acceptable. For example, The Martian. It had three really awful fonts embedded. Free Serif, Free Sans, and Free Mono. All much much too light on an eInk screen.

I've also seen where the right margin is larger then the left margin. I know why that was done, buy these days, that's not needed. It was done because of the right margin page numbers from ADE (before they were allowed to be turned off).

I've also seen cases where offset text was just too small and needed to be made larger but that made the body text too large.

There are lots of eBooks out there with these sort of things that don't need to be done that way.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

@Hitch, there are some things that pBooks do that a lot of eBooks don't do. For example, I don't know of any novels that have paragraph spaces.

Sure, but that isn't actually formatting. That's the author either blithely ignoring all normal standards, or being one of those people that's adamantly supporting blog-style formatting, etc. It's not like...choosing to use the enter key, (empty paragraphs) instead of margin, to create space between a heading and body text. I realize that's a fine distinction and perhaps, a distinction without a difference, but to me, the things we spoke about before were the differences between competent formatting, (top-margin instead of enter-enter-enter, for example), versus some gazoomba making a bad choice around his/her novel. See what I mean?

Embedded fonts can be a problem. For a Kindle they just make the eBooks larger with no benefit as most people won't even know they exist. Also for other Readers, the embedded fonts may not be acceptable. For example, The Martian. It had three really awful fonts embedded. Free Serif, Free Sans, and Free Mono. All much much too light on an eInk screen.

You've mentioned this around the Martian previously and I don't necessarily disagree with you, but IIRC, you could turn those off on a Kindle, no?

I've also seen where the right margin is larger then the left margin. I know why that was done, buy these days, that's not needed. It was done because of the right margin page numbers from ADE (before they were allowed to be turned off).

Yabbt, that's from like, 2011-2012. They're not going to go back and fix those! :-)

I've also seen cases where offset text was just too small and needed to be made larger but that made the body text too large.

Can't speak to that one.

There are lots of eBooks out there with these sort of things that don't need to be done that way.

I would agree with that. I wish that they'd pay me to fix them all, but there you go. If wishes were horses....

Hitch