Assistance with Kindle Oasis 2, KFX, and margins.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Folks, it's NOT widows and orphans. It's how the publisher set the spacing, between paragraphs, which does NOT equal one line of space! This is NOT PRINT, and squared pages---which, by the way, are only done today by trade publishing houses, because despite what people believe, it's not done through kerning and leading, but, rather, by requiring the author/editor to add X characters or remove them--but digital. That means that the spacing between paragraphs can vary--so that, between regular body paragraphs, perhaps it's a half-space (half line-height). Between scenes, it can be almost anything.

What this means is simply this--if your page has 3 paragraphs, with two half-spaces between them, the LAST LINE is going to be in a different spot, ever-so-slightly--than if you have 4 paragraphs with 3 half-spaces between them. It's not rocket surgery, and the ONLY way to eliminate it would be to change the amount of space, the top- or bottom-margin, between paragraphs. Even THEN, it might not be exact, for a zillion different reasons. If the publisher used a different font, with a different ascender height, in the middle of a line, it will affect the line-heights, and that will affect the page, and the "squaring" of it.

Do the math. If a line is 1.2ems high, and the space BETWEEN them is not 1.2ems high, but something else--think about it. It's NEVER going to be squared, not ever. Not unless every single screen has the same number of lines, and the same number of paragraphs.

With all due respect, without redoing the entire book, changing it to a monospace font, changing the line-heights to 1.0, rather than 1.2 ems (which you probably cannot do and override the Amazon settings), you'll never "fix" it. That's because it's not broken.

If this actually bothers you, I'd also strongly recommend that you don't read ANY self-pubbed print books, either, because they don't bother to square the pages--they think that widows and orphans matter more, so they choose that over page squaring. Most self-pubs won't sit there and edit a given page, to eliminate 24 characters, so that they can square the page. Believe me, we've done over 4,000 eBooks nad hundreds of print, and you know how many times a self-pub went through the effort to square a page, by doing what Random House does? ONCE. And for that matter, most trade pubs aren't bothering to do it any longer, either.

It's not broken. There's no easy or magical or Calibre fix. You'd have to change the entire rendering system so that the line-heights are all the same, and the space between paragraphs = a single line height, for it to square--and then, yes, the widow and orphans settings will also cause this. OR, the space between paragraphs--even scene-breaks--will have to be the same as the space between lines inside a paragraph. That's the only way. No fleurons, no asterisms, no this, no that. It would look like your basic 1960's term paper, typed on a manual typewriter, rather than a modern book. THEN, you'd have squared pages.

I mean, can we all remember, for a moment, that ebooks reflow? The pages are NOT set? It's not fixed-layout? This is how they are intended to work.

Hitch

Varying bottom margin doesn't bother me personally in the least. But spaces between paragraphs do, when they're different from the spaces between lines inside the paragraph. Those have to go. (Scene-breaks don't count, they must have spacing, of course).

I'll never understand why people insist on putting spaces between paragraphs in an ebook. It's a book, not a webpage. Yes, I'm afraid I'm rather anal about this.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Varying bottom margin doesn't bother me personally in the least. But spaces between paragraphs do, when they're different from the spaces between lines inside the paragraph. Those have to go. (Scene-breaks don't count, they must have spacing, of course).

I'll never understand why people insist on putting spaces between paragraphs in an ebook. It's a book, not a webpage. Yes, I'm afraid I'm rather anal about this.

Paragraphs are "units" of text, and personally I like a small gap (0.2-0.3em) between them.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Varying bottom margin doesn't bother me personally in the least. But spaces between paragraphs do, when they're different from the spaces between lines inside the paragraph. Those have to go. (Scene-breaks don't count, they must have spacing, of course).

I'll never understand why people insist on putting spaces between paragraphs in an ebook. It's a book, not a webpage. Yes, I'm afraid I'm rather anal about this.

Well, you can be as anal as you wish, but it's not that uncommon, even in print. I don't mean the idiotic practice of putting a full line of whitespace, between first-line-idented paragraphs; I mean the practice of, for example, using a very small additional amount of space, between paragraphs. I don't mean between scene-breaks, either--which need them. I mean, regular old paragraphs. For example, here's an eBook that we made (don't blame me for the sidebars), http://www.booknook.biz/media/com_tw...Blood_MOBI.png . That tiny bit of additional space helps the person reading the book get a small visual "break" between her very dense paragraphs. On some devices, like smartphones, you can end up with a wall of text. This is the original print layout-- http://www.booknook.biz/media/com_tw..._Blood_PDF.png and you can imagine what that layout, wihtout that teeny breath of air, looks like on a smartphone. Ignore the sidebar entirely--I can tell you, it's dense. It's not people trying to make it look like a webpage; it's a small cue, to let people know "hey, new para here." That's all.

I can tell you that that book, on KF7 devices, (which don't have that teeny-weeny bit of space) can get pretty damned dense, pretty quickly. Do you ever read on your smartphone, or an older eInk? If you do, then you know whereof I speak.

Originally Posted by HarryT

Paragraphs are "units" of text, and personally I like a small gap (0.2-0.3em) between them.

Exactly. I don't hold with needless space. Or block-style, for fiction/memoirs, etc. But the entire point of typography--both print and digital--is to facilitate ease of reading, by the reader. Not merely to look foofy or what-have-you. The point of GREAT typography is to ensure that the book doesn't get between the reader and the story/content. Making a wall of text, just to stick to some idea that ANY space between paragraphs is a sin, is not serving the reader. It's sticking to rules for no reason.

AND, while we're on the subject, I would suggest that everyone who thinks that using that wee bit of space, above/below, around subheads, etc., is against the "rules," that you should read Robert Bringhurst--the modern father of Typography--in "The Elements of Typographic Style," (20th Anniversary Edition), pages 39-43. In those pages, he explains where that additional leading (margin, essentially above/below a paragraph) must be used. That doesn't change, just because it's an ebook. In print, you can do other things so that the squaring of the page is accomplished--but in eBooks, you can't.

So, do you give up readability around blockquotes, around indented content, pullquotes, some letter to a fictional character, etc., in an eBook, just to stick with rules that honestly, don't even exist?

Hitch

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, you can be as anal as you wish, but it's not that uncommon, even in print. I don't mean the idiotic practice of putting a full line of whitespace, between first-line-idented paragraphs; I mean the practice of, for example, using a very small additional amount of space, between paragraphs. I don't mean between scene-breaks, either--which need them. I mean, regular old paragraphs. For example, here's an eBook that we made (don't blame me for the sidebars), http://www.booknook.biz/media/com_tw...Blood_MOBI.png . That tiny bit of additional space helps the person reading the book get a small visual "break" between her very dense paragraphs. On some devices, like smartphones, you can end up with a wall of text. This is the original print layout-- http://www.booknook.biz/media/com_tw..._Blood_PDF.png and you can imagine what that layout, wihtout that teeny breath of air, looks like on a smartphone. Ignore the sidebar entirely--I can tell you, it's dense. It's not people trying to make it look like a webpage; it's a small cue, to let people know "hey, new para here." That's all.

I can tell you that that book, on KF7 devices, (which don't have that teeny-weeny bit of space) can get pretty damned dense, pretty quickly. Do you ever read on your smartphone, or an older eInk? If you do, then you know whereof I speak.



Exactly. I don't hold with needless space. Or block-style, for fiction/memoirs, etc. But the entire point of typography--both print and digital--is to facilitate ease of reading, by the reader. Not merely to look foofy or what-have-you. The point of GREAT typography is to ensure that the book doesn't get between the reader and the story/content. Making a wall of text, just to stick to some idea that ANY space between paragraphs is a sin, is not serving the reader. It's sticking to rules for no reason.

AND, while we're on the subject, I would suggest that everyone who thinks that using that wee bit of space, above/below, around subheads, etc., is against the "rules," that you should read Robert Bringhurst--the modern father of Typography--in "The Elements of Typographic Style," (20th Anniversary Edition), pages 39-43. In those pages, he explains where that additional leading (margin, essentially above/below a paragraph) must be used. That doesn't change, just because it's an ebook. In print, you can do other things so that the squaring of the page is accomplished--but in eBooks, you can't.

So, do you give up readability around blockquotes, around indented content, pullquotes, some letter to a fictional character, etc., in an eBook, just to stick with rules that honestly, don't even exist?

Hitch

It's not the rules. For me it's just personal preference which I happen to hold rather strongly. And yes, the formatting in your first picture would bother me in a book, it doesn't matter whether it's print or electronic, on a phone or on an ereader. In fact, the smaller the screen, the more it would bother me. Text-indents (no bigger than 1em) are all I need to differentiate between paragraphs. Anything else distracts me. The only place where I like the spacing between paragraphs is the 14'' screen of my laptop, but I don't read books there.

I realize that possibly I'm an oddity in this. Fortunately it's not really hard to remove the offending spaces in an editing program.

[HarryT]

I'm sure you'll agree, Sirtel, that there's a considerable difference between having a personal preference and saying "I'll never understand why people insist on putting spaces between paragraphs in an ebook." Preferences don't generally preclude the possibility of being able to appreciate that other people may have different views .

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm sure you'll agree, Sirtel, that there's a considerable difference between having a personal preference and saying "I'll never understand why people insist on putting spaces between paragraphs in an ebook." Preferences don't generally preclude the possibility of being able to appreciate that other people may have different views .

Of course I don't understand it from my personal viewpoint. That doesn't mean that I go around demanding all the others must have my preferences too or else... I totally get that everyone has different preferences.

[tomsem]

I’m curious about this ‘widows and orphans’ issue. About 99% of my ebook reading is on Kindle platform. Even with so-called Enhanced Typography, I still see this happening with some frequency. I don’t like it, especially when sub-titles show up at the bottom of a page, or captions that wind up on a different page than the image or figure they describe. Continuous Scrolling is a sort of workaround to this, but it does not work on Kindles, and Amazon has not really finished implementation of it (no Immersion Reading, no Speak Screen, no equivalent of Page View or even a scroller to help with navigation).

Am I to blame Amazon, lazy publishers who don’t care what their product looks like, or myself for being too sensitive?

Does KFX/KF8 even support ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ properties? (I can find no mention in Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines 2019.1)

I fired up Bookari for iOS and downloaded a Feedbooks edition of Sherlock Holmes. It uses both Adobe RMSDK and Readium SDK (I think the latter for whatever EPUB 3 stuff is supported). I don’t see a single orphan or widow (granted this is a sample of 1 and has very simple formatting). I don’t know if this is because Feedbooks use of CSS or an implementation decision of the rendering engine. And yes, bottom margin varies from page to page, leaving me wonder if I’ve completed a chapter section, or if it is just the result of avoiding orphans and widows on relatively small (compared to print) page size. But I still think it is ‘better’.

I fired up Apple Books and opened up one of those ‘Idiot’s Guide’ books, which has more complicated formatting. Indeed, it has what I consider one of the more egregious variants of Orphaning: a section header that appears at the bottom of the page, separated from the body text that follows on the next page. Simply intolerable, I say! But is there CSS property that tells the section header to move to start of next page to stick with the paragraph following?

In any case, it seems, I must continue to tolerate some non-zero level of what I judge to be bad typography, or give up reading ebooks. I don’t understand what is so hard about this. Can’t rendering engine apply some heuristics, at least where there’s ample processing power? Do we have to wait for machine learning to find its way to reading platforms?

I don’t want more Settings in the reading platform, I have no time to play with CSS. I just want it to look better.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Does KFX/KF8 even support ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ properties? (I can find no mention in Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines 2019.1)

They are explicitly listed as ignored for Enhanced Typesetting (KFX) in Appendix B and they are not listed in the supported CSS for KF8 in Appendix C.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I’m curious about this ‘widows and orphans’ issue. About 99% of my ebook reading is on Kindle platform. Even with so-called Enhanced Typography, I still see this happening with some frequency. I don’t like it, especially when sub-titles show up at the bottom of a page, or captions that wind up on a different page than the image or figure they describe. Continuous Scrolling is a sort of workaround to this, but it does not work on Kindles, and Amazon has not really finished implementation of it (no Immersion Reading, no Speak Screen, no equivalent of Page View or even a scroller to help with navigation).

Am I to blame Amazon, lazy publishers who don’t care what their product looks like, or myself for being too sensitive?

Does KFX/KF8 even support ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ properties? (I can find no mention in Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines 2019.1)

I fired up Bookari for iOS and downloaded a Feedbooks edition of Sherlock Holmes. It uses both Adobe RMSDK and Readium SDK (I think the latter for whatever EPUB 3 stuff is supported). I don’t see a single orphan or widow (granted this is a sample of 1 and has very simple formatting). I don’t know if this is because Feedbooks use of CSS or an implementation decision of the rendering engine. And yes, bottom margin varies from page to page, leaving me wonder if I’ve completed a chapter section, or if it is just the result of avoiding orphans and widows on relatively small (compared to print) page size. But I still think it is ‘better’.

I fired up Apple Books and opened up one of those ‘Idiot’s Guide’ books, which has more complicated formatting. Indeed, it has what I consider one of the more egregious variants of Orphaning: a section header that appears at the bottom of the page, separated from the body text that follows on the next page. Simply intolerable, I say! But is there CSS property that tells the section header to move to start of next page to stick with the paragraph following?

In any case, it seems, I must continue to tolerate some non-zero level of what I judge to be bad typography, or give up reading ebooks. I don’t understand what is so hard about this. Can’t rendering engine apply some heuristics, at least where there’s ample processing power? Do we have to wait for machine learning to find its way to reading platforms?

I don’t want more Settings in the reading platform, I have no time to play with CSS. I just want it to look better.

Question, before I endeavor to respond to this--do you write any code at all, or markup? HTML? Anything like that?

Hitch

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jhowell

They are explicitly listed as ignored for Enhanced Typesetting (KFX) in Appendix B and they are not listed in the supported CSS for KF8 in Appendix C.

Thanks, I was looking in Appendix C (having jumped over Appendix B). I had not looked at it since before there was a KFX section. Looking forward to reading through that.

[Tomifonication]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, you can be as anal as you wish, but it's not that uncommon, even in print. I don't mean the idiotic practice of putting a full line of whitespace, between first-line-idented paragraphs; I mean the practice of, for example, using a very small additional amount of space, between paragraphs. I don't mean between scene-breaks, either--which need them. I mean, regular old paragraphs. For example, here's an eBook that we made (don't blame me for the sidebars), http://www.booknook.biz/media/com_tw...Blood_MOBI.png . That tiny bit of additional space helps the person reading the book get a small visual "break" between her very dense paragraphs. On some devices, like smartphones, you can end up with a wall of text. This is the original print layout-- http://www.booknook.biz/media/com_tw..._Blood_PDF.png and you can imagine what that layout, wihtout that teeny breath of air, looks like on a smartphone. Ignore the sidebar entirely--I can tell you, it's dense. It's not people trying to make it look like a webpage; it's a small cue, to let people know "hey, new para here." That's all.

I can tell you that that book, on KF7 devices, (which don't have that teeny-weeny bit of space) can get pretty damned dense, pretty quickly. Do you ever read on your smartphone, or an older eInk? If you do, then you know whereof I speak.



Exactly. I don't hold with needless space. Or block-style, for fiction/memoirs, etc. But the entire point of typography--both print and digital--is to facilitate ease of reading, by the reader. Not merely to look foofy or what-have-you. The point of GREAT typography is to ensure that the book doesn't get between the reader and the story/content. Making a wall of text, just to stick to some idea that ANY space between paragraphs is a sin, is not serving the reader. It's sticking to rules for no reason.

AND, while we're on the subject, I would suggest that everyone who thinks that using that wee bit of space, above/below, around subheads, etc., is against the "rules," that you should read Robert Bringhurst--the modern father of Typography--in "The Elements of Typographic Style," (20th Anniversary Edition), pages 39-43. In those pages, he explains where that additional leading (margin, essentially above/below a paragraph) must be used. That doesn't change, just because it's an ebook. In print, you can do other things so that the squaring of the page is accomplished--but in eBooks, you can't.

So, do you give up readability around blockquotes, around indented content, pullquotes, some letter to a fictional character, etc., in an eBook, just to stick with rules that honestly, don't even exist?

Hitch

This isn't what we're talking about; we're discussing the removing of line-breaks between paragraphs. Now that the kind ladies and gentleman within the thread have advised me how to tweak via CSS, I've now achieved the uniform look I want.

I appreciate you're something of a puritan with your formatting, but ultimately eBooks give us additional control over how our page is structured. I'm not going to suffer poor styling choices (in my opinion) that affect my reading experience just because it's what the publisher intended.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I’m curious about this ‘widows and orphans’ issue. About 99% of my ebook reading is on Kindle platform. Even with so-called Enhanced Typography, I still see this happening with some frequency. I don’t like it, especially when sub-titles show up at the bottom of a page, or captions that wind up on a different page than the image or figure they describe. Continuous Scrolling is a sort of workaround to this, but it does not work on Kindles, and Amazon has not really finished implementation of it (no Immersion Reading, no Speak Screen, no equivalent of Page View or even a scroller to help with navigation).

Okay, so, let's start with the fundies (fundamentals). How does the eReader KNOW where the text begins and ends, on the screen? Quick answer--it actually doesn't. The software, behind the scenes, renders a big old roll of toilet paper. It's effectively a 1990's website. No pages, no nothing. Just software that tells the device "at font size X, you can display Y lines of content, assuming the device is a Zed device." In the Kindleverse, that would translate to something like, "if you're at font size 3, you can display 25 lines of content on a Fire classic IN PORTRAIT orientation." It's probably not even that sophisticated; it's probably done in pixels versus some obscure calculation in font size = X in pixel size, but.,..that's how it works.

It bookmarks, internally, where the reader last stopped reading, so that it knows where to pick it up. But all it does is scroll X amount of space, behind the screen, each time the reader clicks. It doesn't KNOW that it's displaying 10 lines or 20 lines of content and that that content "could be" another 5 lines if there wasn't space between the paragraphs. Every time you change the font size, the ENTIRE book re-renders, and is re-scrolled to where you currently are in the TP. That's pretty much IT.

Am I to blame Amazon, lazy publishers who don’t care what their product looks like, or myself for being too sensitive?

That assumes that any "blame" is due at all. As I said, you have this big long roll of toilet paper, designed to try to please EVERY possible reader--Jane who reads at font size 8, in landscape, on her smartphone; Fred who reads at font size 3 on his Fire 10", in portrait. Two wildly different views of the same content. What you're asking for would, I tend to think, not only require significant recoding of the Kindle OS, but it would probably take a lot more processing power.

BTW: for the sake of accuracy in discussing typography, "widows and orphans" have nothing to do with stranded headings, image captions, etc. Those aren't widows or orphans. Widows and orphans are, in short:

When a paragraph BEGINS as the last line of a page, that's an orphan. (Bringhurst's method to remember it--someone that has no past, but does have a future). When a paragraph stub ends on the first line of a new page, that's a widow. FYI, orphans, in typography, are not actually considered "bad" as they are in secretarial services and the like. Widows should be dealt with, yes--but orphans? No. Despite popular belief.

The old word-processing "widows and orphans" rule is unrelated to the topics of headings and body text. The idea that body text shouldn't pull away from its related heading is simply...a rule of thumb, for readability. Not some hard-and-fast typesetting rule that cannot be broken under threat of thumb amputation by your fellow ink-stained buddies.

Even iBooks, which has a LOT more processing power available to it, doesn't fix all the issues you're talking about on the fly--and, those it does, like widows/orphans, it limits, in terms of permutations by only having two font sizes and a limited number of devices to deal with. Kindles? A whole other kettle of fish. I tried to work out the permutations that the software works through, just covering the basics, each time someone clicks, and without even taking into account many of the more-advanced options in the newer devices, I was at 38,400, just covering fonts, font sizes, 10 basic devices and orientation. Throw in users being able to adjust margins and line-heights, AND the CSS that comes from the book producers, and it's millions. Millions of permutations, every time someone clicks a Kindle page/screen. AND--it still doesn't/can't know where the actual text is.

Does KFX/KF8 even support ‘orphans’ and ‘widows’ properties? (I can find no mention in Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines 2019.1)

Nope, they do not. And probably because of the reasons I just mentioned--the device scrolls X pixels of content, behind the screen. Whether that's Jane's 10 lines or Fred's 20, or a heading or a caption, or an image separated from the caption, the device doesn't care, because it doesn't know.

It's not hard to envision--one screen, one roll of TP behind it, and software that says "if you're reading this in portrait, font size X, scroll X pixels of the "page" behind the screen." Voila. (not quite that simple, of course, but...that's the basic idea.) It doesn't know if that's an image, image with caption, paragraphs of text, etc.

I fired up Bookari for iOS and downloaded a Feedbooks edition of Sherlock Holmes. It uses both Adobe RMSDK and Readium SDK (I think the latter for whatever EPUB 3 stuff is supported). I don’t see a single orphan or widow (granted this is a sample of 1 and has very simple formatting). I don’t know if this is because Feedbooks use of CSS or an implementation decision of the rendering engine. And yes, bottom margin varies from page to page, leaving me wonder if I’ve completed a chapter section, or if it is just the result of avoiding orphans and widows on relatively small (compared to print) page size. But I still think it is ‘better’.

Well, the software used may well recognize, or use, widows/orphans, which would tell the device "when you scroll, make sure you scroll these X pixels with it," but to do that, they're limiting other options. No doubt about it. I don't use Bookari--seems to me that I used that on my Windows 8/10 Tablet/Laptop device (Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga) and it annoyed me. Don't recall why; could be something minor, and I just don't remember what that was.

I fired up Apple Books and opened up one of those ‘Idiot’s Guide’ books, which has more complicated formatting. Indeed, it has what I consider one of the more egregious variants of Orphaning: a section header that appears at the bottom of the page, separated from the body text that follows on the next page. Simply intolerable, I say! But is there CSS property that tells the section header to move to start of next page to stick with the paragraph following?

In typography, that's "keep with next," used to keep headings with their content, or some portion thereof. Yes, there is a CSS property, which is "page-break-inside:avoid," if memory serves, which only works in blockquotes and pre formatted content. And it's ePUB2. There's page-break before; you can see how that won't work, given the reflowable nature of ebooks, and page-break after, ditto.

Hell, even in websites, unless I've missed a new trick (entirely possible) I believe that the go-to is still using divs, around images and captions, TRYING to keep them together, not always successfully. And a website has all the processing power in the world available to it, unlike a portable device. And even then--doesn't always work. There are probably some cooler things available in CSS3, and I know that I've been able to use Bootstrap, on my own site, to keep X and Y together, but then again, I'm not doing anything that fancy on my site--images and captions, pretty much, and hell, for all I know, they're breaking apart hither and yon.

In short, last time I looked, no HTML CSS existed that actually kept text together in disparate elements (a heading a a paragraph, or two paragraphs, an image and a caption). SOME amount of widows/orphans seems to work, but that's page-break-inside:avoid, which is quite different than making disparate elements stay together.

In any case, it seems, I must continue to tolerate some non-zero level of what I judge to be bad typography, or give up reading ebooks.

Pretty much, yes.

I don’t understand what is so hard about this. Can’t rendering engine apply some heuristics, at least where there’s ample processing power? Do we have to wait for machine learning to find its way to reading platforms?

I don’t want more Settings in the reading platform, I have no time to play with CSS. I just want it to look better.

For one thing, the "ample processing power" doesn't exist, for the sake of portability. For the other, as I mentioned, every single click, every change, can cause millions of calculations, due to the vast number of permutations. I fail to see why you would think that "machine learning" would solve it.

If the CSS existed, on websites, to do it, that would be one conversation--but even THEY deal with far, far fewer permutations than does Amazon or other device-makers and software renderers--changing fonts, for example. Hyphenation for another. On websites the reader doesn't change the line-heights, the margins, the fonts. They can't tell the website to hyphenate, or not. Yet, in that quite limited environment, comparing apples-to-apples, "keep together" still doesn't work.

But you're asking it to work in an environment with far less processing power, and hundreds of thousands or even millions more permutations, where the end user controls most of the choices? Where each and every author or publisher makes choices in design that affects the rendering? Where one guy might just slap in his image, and a caption below it, not even marked or coded as a caption, but rather, a paragraph; someone else uses them in a table, with two rows, and a third person puts them in a div, with "page-break-inside: avoid" deployed?

The TL, DR version:

Lots and lots and lots of permutations--and lots and lots and lots of workarounds, getting around limitations in CSS. Basically, you're asking eReaders to do 10x the work of websites, with millions more permuations and on-the-fly calculations, with much much less processing power.

Why is it so hard to do?

Quite simply, just because it is.

Hitch

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tomifonication

This isn't what we're talking about; we're discussing the removing of line-breaks between paragraphs. Now that the kind ladies and gentleman within the thread have advised me how to tweak via CSS, I've now achieved the uniform look I want.

Actually, we were talking about removing ANY additional "white space" from between paragraphs, which can be created in myriad different ways, and in myriad different sizes, whether it's a top-margin on the ensuing paragraph, or a bottom margin on the preceding, or some idiot hitting "enter" between them. I did speak to that, but yes, I spoke about other things as well.

I appreciate you're something of a puritan with your formatting, but ultimately eBooks give us additional control over how our page is structured. I'm not going to suffer poor styling choices (in my opinion) that affect my reading experience just because it's what the publisher intended.

I follow the basic rules of typography and typesetting, yes, as set down by folks with a lot more experience than I in so doing. The "rules" of typesetting vary--some are nothing more than tradition, but many exist for good reasons, and yes, at my company, we think that we should follow those, like the golden rule on line-lengths, which has been proven, in studies, to exist for legitimate reasons related to how folks' brains process lines of text.

I always wonder what all the folks do, who are SO upset about typography choices in eBooks, when reading print--do they retype the book, so as to set it to their OWN styling choices?

Hitch

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I always wonder what all the folks do, who are SO upset about typography choices in eBooks, when reading print--do they retype the book, so as to set it to their OWN styling choices?

Hitch

I don't have any print books with spaces between paragraphs. The first time I encountered that particular styling choice was in ebooks. Granted, it's common with webpages and it doesn't bother me there, because usually I use the internet on my laptop. But it does bother me on a smaller screen.

As to poor font choices, yes those did bother me in paper books, but it was not possible to change them, so I just had to swallow it. Fortunately it is possible to change anything you want in an ebook.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I don't have any print books with spaces between paragraphs. The first time I encountered that particular styling choice was in ebooks. Granted, it's common with webpages and it doesn't bother me there, because usually I use the internet on my laptop. But it does bother me on a smaller screen.

As to poor font choices, yes those did bother me in paper books, but it was not possible to change them, so I just had to swallow it. Fortunately it is possible to change anything you want in an ebook.

In fiction, that's true. Non-fiction, obviously, not so much, and it terms of "other" spacing, of course, fiction has had scene-breaks forever, that affect the spacing. Nonfiction's always had it with heads, subheads, run-in heads and so on and so forth.

My point being, whether it's spacing, fonts, justification versus not, etc., somehow, everyone managed to survive it, without keeling over dead from the horror, when they only had print books. I don't recall a lot of Sturm und Drang at the bookstore, from appalled and horrified buyers, banding together with pitchforks to go slay the typographer or the publisher.

So, like everything else in self-publishing (like people complaining to Amazon about--gasp!--typos, and expecting them to be fixed RIGHT AWAY!), the immediacy of digital publishing and self-gratification has affected the view of how important or how unlivable these things are.

That's all.

Hitch