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#61 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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![]() BTW, I've no beef with scene breaks, nor the spacing before and after quotes, letters and the like. It's the spaces between any and all paragraphs that bother me. |
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#62 | |
Grand Sorcerer
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At least that’s what I remember — it has been years since I’ve read one. If I HAD to read one, it would be uncomfortable, but for other reasons. My complaints about ebook typography in no way have me nostalgic for print books. It is ‘better than ever’, but it just seems obvious that there is room for improvement. Last edited by tomsem; 04-24-2019 at 11:03 PM. |
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#63 | |
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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I do feel that I should point out that the rationale for squared pages is for opposing pages, more than "every" page. Yes, it's true that old school typesetters will sit there, print out pages both front/back and hold them up to the light, to check them, both for density and squaring, so the standard-bearers do check for "all" pages--but the norm is facing pages, not all. I mention this because obviously, eBooks typically don't have facing pages. I suspect that 99% of all eBook readers have never thought about whether or not the last line on a page is at the same exact pixel as the previous. [shrug] Hitch |
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#64 |
Resident Curmudgeon
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Hitch, I'd like your opinion.
Given that a lot of people who read eBooks be they ePub, KF8, or KFX, they aren't going to be trying to dive into the code and changing it to what they want. They read the eBook as is. So, what's the best overall formatting with regards to paragraphs and space between or no space between and if yes to space between paragraphs, hiw much space? Also, what do you think of chapter headings that are overly large (IMHO)? I've seen some that use a 20% top margin. Even a I think even a 2em top margin is too large. I go with a .8em top/bottom margin in most cases. It doesn't waste too much space and looks a lot better. What's your opinion in chatper headings? Another thing, why is it that publishers do not use proper blockquotes and instead use overly complicated simulated blockquotes? Personally, I turn widows and orphans off in CSS and I remove paragraph spacing. The result of this is that on a page with no extra space, the page ends in the same place as any other page that fills the screen with no extra spacing such as a section break or offset text. |
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#65 | ||||||
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Natch, formatting genius that I am. (HA!!!)
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In typography of the old-school, you set your indents to be harmonious. For example, if your page is set to a 12/14 (12pt font in a 14 point line-height or lead), then traditionally, you set your indent to 1em (the font size) or 1 lead (14pt sized). To do that in an eBook, you'd realistically set that to 1.2ems (for the one lead sizing). Most folks in the eBook world--or, I should say, most professionals, as far as I know--use one em. I don't think I've seen very many one-lead indents, but it's possible. But on some devices, the indents and line-spacing (line-height) can be overriden. Margins, not so much. So, let's say that you did use a 12/14; you did use a one-lead ident, but Moon Reader or what-have-you overrides it. How does the reader more easily "see" the new paragraph, if the indents have disappeared or, rather, all-but-disappeared? That extra nudge of space helps. That's one of the reasons that in very, very text-heavy books that we do, with very long paragraphs, you'll see us put in a very small additional amount of space, between them. The Kindles typically don't mess up the formatting that much, but you'd be amazed at what one person with Kindle for PC can DO to your book. Otherwise, I actually do agree with most--no spacing between paragraphs, it can be a blight, and I certainly don't hold with a full line (or even a half-line) between first-line-indent paras. Quote:
![]() If someone has a big print chapter head, we'll try to emulate it in an eBook, at an appropriate size and distance from the margins. We tell our clients that we "channel" the look and feel, not match it EXACTLY. We deal with this all the damn time, with clients that insist that their eBook "heading" has to be 48pts, or whatever, just like their print book, and I show them WHY that's a terrible idea. I can usually talk them out of it, but NOT always. I've been required to slap something in there like that. When they won't defer to my judgement, I'll tell them that we'll do it, but I put in a proviso that if the book comes back from Amazon with a KQN, or a reader complaint, etc., we won't fix it for free. Just like I'll turn down fixed-layout for any book that doesn't absolutely need it, just because the client doesn't understand eBooks. Won't do it. Quote:
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I think that some folks think that their ideas about what's "right" or "wrong" in typesetting are real, when oftentimes, they're not. I've had more than a few instances of this. Had one client that had a COW about alleged stub-ends. She thought that any single word, at the end of a paragraph, was this horrible typographic faux-pas, and that we--the typesetters--had to manually kern her entire paragraph, to make it fit. Uh, NOPE. Yes, stubs under 3 letters are considered "messy," and post-hyphenation stubs are considered to be a typographic mistake, but a word like "there" isn't. Or the client that went through her book, and sent us something like 600 edits--all removing the word "I" from the last spot in any given line. Some idiot had told her that lines in a book--I mean, the end of any given line, inside a paragraph--couldn't end with "I" as in: Quote:
It's like anything else--typesetting is beset with urban myths, or whatever you want to call them, other than misconceptions, about what's right and wrong. For example, Orphans (when the first line of a paragraph starts at the bottom of a page) aren't actually wrong. There's no reason to turn yourself inside out, to move that to the next page. That's an idea borne by Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Word. Not typographers. But, it's taken hold, and now I get to deal with scores of authors who both want their pages squared--and no widows or orphans, either. Well, I hate to tell ya, but that's a lotta lotta "tweaky" time. It's one thing to set INDD to not have widows--it's another to do that AND square the pages. Anyway, you wanted my opinions, and, oh lucky you, now you have them. :-) Hitch |
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#66 | |||||
Resident Curmudgeon
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Yes, you are good and know a lot of the gotchas when it comes to having to try to please people while trying not to bow-down to silly requests.
I wonder what some of your clients would say if I took their eBook and formatted it the way I like without all of this farting about and silly formatting. Have you seen some of the eBooks I've posted on MR? Quote:
As for the paragraph spaces, I prefer not to have them. Even a .3em parargraph space is annoying. Thing is, programs like Moon Reader that basically override mot things, if the paragraph indent is set to off, then that's a user error and one that is easily fixed by just changing the setting. So if that's the reason for paragraph spaces, then I would not put them in. There are some programs such as Marvin that can set paragraph spaces. But ADE cannot do this. ADE (the most used program for reading ePub) cannot do a lot of things so that has to be taken into account. What I really dislike a lot are program for reading ePub that override just about everything and never once fully respect the CSS. It's find to have the overrides, but if the overrides are set to off, then that should mean to respect the CSS. And some programs have no clue what they are doing when they override indents. AN indent of 0 has a meaning and should be respected when there are indents. Quote:
Here is the CSS code for the chapter title in another eBook that's just bad form. There's too much in it then there needs to be and 10em looks awful as a top margin. Code:
.cn { display: block; font-size: 1.55em; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; font-family: serif; text-align: left; margin-top: 10em; margin-bottom: 2em; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; text-indent: 0; } Code:
.cn { font-size: 1.55em; font-weight: bold; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; } [quoteB]ecause they a) don't know how or b) think that BQ formatting doesn't work in MOBI, usually. I also loathe it, but...Jon, if you didn't see under their skirts, would you really object? Typically, you only know that they're there because you CAN, not because it's obvious. ![]() But I've seen some pretty poor fake BQ formatting. A real BQ would have not had such bad formatting. I've seen formatting with left/right margins at 5%. Or with no right margin. That's just going to look awful in both cases. The default values for a BQ would have worked much better. Quote:
As for the person who wanted the I removed, I would have shown that person a few paragraphs with the I at the end of a line and changed the font size so that wasn't there. ![]() Quote:
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#67 | ||||||||
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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#68 | ||||||
Resident Curmudgeon
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[code]Agreed, but as you know, not all do. But I would disagree with you that "most" people use ADE. I don't think that's right. I mean...I don't have another candidate, but I just don't think most people read on desktops, compared to smartphones, dedicated devices, etc. I think that's an assumption on your part, Jon.[/quote] ADE is used in most Readers that handle ePub. ADE is used on laptops/Windows tablets, and yes desktops (but probably not that much). Some programs use RMDSK (the heart of ADE) such as Bluefire Reader. Quote:
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#69 | ||||
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Yeah, that's an argument. Quote:
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Hitch |
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