Please turn Tidy off by default

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

I must differ with you about that depending on what you mean by 'simulated'. I done numerous epubs that have smallcaps fonts and they show perfectly on ADE, and also on my bebook one, prs-950, and rooted nook native ADE reader and Aldiko.

True, but you need to add a font for that. ADE does not support/honor the CSS attribute for small caps.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

True, but you need to add a font for that. ADE does not support/honor the CSS attribute for small caps.

+1 to this..

Advice given is for Native support.
In many cases there is a work-around , but like centered, fractional <hr />, it does not happen unless you do the work-around, trick.

[Hitch]

Ditto. +1 fersure. Toxie and Duckie know whereof they speak.

Hitch

[bobcdy]

Perhaps my confusion came from my interpretion of 'simulated' to mean something like:

T<span class="small">HE</span>

I see from internet usage, however, that a simulated small cap is a small cap created by the css property 'font-variant: small-caps;' and this small cap will only approximate a true small cap font that is created by embedding.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

Perhaps my confusion came from my interpretion of 'simulated' to mean something like:

T<span class="small">HE</span>

I see from internet usage, however, that a simulated small cap is a small cap created by the css property 'font-variant: small-caps;' and this small cap will only approximate a true small cap font that is created by embedding.

Your example appears to be the work-around
where "small" probably includes something like : font-size 85%

T<span class="smallcap">he</span>
with the font variant, should raise the lower case letters to HE and be smaller than the Upper case letters

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by bobcdy

I see from internet usage, however, that a simulated small cap is a small cap created by the css property 'font-variant: small-caps;' and this small cap will only approximate a true small cap font that is created by embedding.

That's only simulated if the browser does not know how to use a true smallcaps font, or if it's not available. It would be the same for 'font-style: italics', for instance, if there is no italic variant available, the browser could simulate it by artificially slanting the font (ADE will do this in that case, I believe). Similarly, if there is no true smallcaps font, the browser can simulate it. There are fonts which include true smallcaps variants, and there are even OTF fonts that have them in the same file. However, as far as I know, ADE will neither use nor simulate smallcaps. Even with embedded fonts, I believe you have to use a different family name for the smallcaps font in ADE (i.e., you cannot simply define it as a smallcaps variant of other font, something you can do with italics or bold).

[Toxaris]

You are correct Jellby. It is unfortunate, but untill ADE changes this, I am afraid most readers will not support this. I can understand that they wanted to keep the installed font small, but they should have at least either supported automated smallcaps (like slanting) or support it when a font does have the smallcaps included.

[seanos]

Thanks for the enlightenment guys! (still wasn't getting notifications since there seems to be another thread-level choice that was turned off).

It's mystifying that Adobe would choose to create another Microsoft-style monopoly-driven standards failure, but I suppose there's not much to be done about it. HTML/CSS is so standard and prevalent these days it really makes no sense to support only a random subset.

I had already tried faking small caps (font-size: 80%; text-transform: uppercase, so I could easily just change styles. Don't suppose anyone's come up with a hacky way of detecting ADE like the old IE hacks?

I was also relying on percentage widths for <hr/> too; I wonder if it can be hacked around with <div>s. Time to download ADE I suppose.

[Toxaris]

Actually, Adobe is not fully to blame here. The IDPF specifications of the the ePUB format are sometimes vague or open to interpretation. According to those specifications, not the whole CSS2 and XHTML format should be supported.
However, small-caps should be according to the specifications.

For smaller <hr /> you can always use something like:

hr.small {
 margin-left: 30%;
 margin-right: 30%;
}

If you use this class, you would get a centered line 40% of the screen width.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by seanos

Thanks for the enlightenment guys! (still wasn't getting notifications since there seems to be another thread-level choice that was turned off).

It's mystifying that Adobe would choose to create another Microsoft-style monopoly-driven standards failure, but I suppose there's not much to be done about it. HTML/CSS is so standard and prevalent these days it really makes no sense to support only a random subset.

I had already tried faking small caps (font-size: 80%; text-transform: uppercase, so I could easily just change styles. Don't suppose anyone's come up with a hacky way of detecting ADE like the old IE hacks?

I was also relying on percentage widths for <hr/> too; I wonder if it can be hacked around with <div>s. Time to download ADE I suppose.

@seanos:

I have to add to this, even though I'm not sure it's directly relevant to your topic, that we've had some real doozy issues with Nook and smallcaps. Now, primarily, we tried, with a very difficult client who could NOT get past it, to do a Raised Initial + smallcap header for chapter and sub-chapter heads, so that the Raised Initial would rise a bit above the small caps.

It never worked, primarily due to B&N's screwing around with the bloody hyphenation. We could get the Raised Initial + smallcaps--but the header would break oddly (in Nook, if you don't overtly turn hyphenation off, it simply hyphenates wherever it runs out of space--NOT at a syllable). If we turned hyphenation off, it would vertically align the whole header. If we left it on, (hyphenation), we'd get bizarro-world hyphens. Due to having two spans inside the header, we could never, ever get it to work.

I don't know if there's been an update since, but that one nearly pushed me over the edge; we must have tried, I kid thee not, 24-25 variants to get it to emulate SOMEHOW...and it never would. I even reached out to Josh at EBA; nada. We tried "real" smallcaps; we tried text-variants; we tried text-size...you name it. We tried it ALL.

So: I'd highly recommend that you download ADE, and if you don't have a Nook, DL their dreadful reading app, Nook for PC. It is far from perfect, but it renders the ePUBs relatively faithfully to what the Nook device will do, and trust me when I tell you, weird stuff happens. As everyone here will tell you, don't even get me STARTED on iBooks' app...just wait until you start playing with that!

Hope this helps, or at least saves someone from pulling their hair out,
Hitch

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by seanos

I had already tried faking small caps (font-size: 80%; text-transform: uppercase;), so I could easily just change styles.

Good try, but "text-transform" is not in the ePub spec (unlike "font-variant" which is in the spec, but not supported by ADE).

Don't suppose anyone's come up with a hacky way of detecting ADE like the old IE hacks?

You can, sort of, by using conditional styles in the page template. I explained it somewhere in the ePub forum, I think it was in the "snippets" thread. I've used this trick for two things so far:

1. Hide elements supposed to be in a header (display: oeb-page-head), which ADE wrongly leaves in the normal text flow. I don't know of any reader that actually supports headers, but at least they should hide the content.

2. Apply some different style instead of smallcaps in ADE. Often, smallcaps are used simply as a way of emphasizing or making some text stand out, and it's not really that important for the text to be rendered actually as smallcaps. In this case, I change the style to bold, or gray background, or underlined... but it's still set as smallcaps in the main CSS.

[JSWolf]

Given the default font size of 1em, a smallcap should be .75em or 75%...

font-size: .75em
font-size: 75%

[Jellby]

That depends on the particular font and its x-height.

[seanos]

Thanks for the continuing advice...might be useful if I got notifications from the forum. Last time I switched them on I got a digest immediately, but nothing since.

ADE quickly showed me text-transform was misguided and I found the hr solution elsewhere. A bit of trial and error has got me to a reasonable accommodation with ADE.

@Hitch: I plan to totally ignore Apple's unnecessary proprietary format so I won't experience any headaches in that direction. I'm only editing an out-of-copyright book that was only available as a largely unintelligible OCR'd epub so I don't need to worry about a market in Apple's evil empire.

[Hitch]

@seanos:

Frankly, Nook is almost as large a headache, and it's the second-largest market behind Amazon, followed by Kobo, in terms of sales. Very annoying. ;-)

HTH,
Hitch