Why H1 and H2 Chapter Headings?

[Ransom]

From the help file:

...calibre will assume chapters start at either <h1> or <h2> tags that have any of the words (chapter, book, section or part) in them or that have the class=”chapter” attribute.

But who would ever use an H1 or H2 heading for text in an e-book? Anything bigger than H3 is huge in a tiny e-reader.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Ransom

From the help file:



But who would ever use an H1 or H2 heading for text in an e-book? Anything bigger than H3 is huge in a tiny e-reader.

Lots of people do.

add to your CSS

h2 {font-size: .75em} /* re-sizes all h2 */

personally, I use h1 for title. h2 for parts and h3 for chapter/sections

[Ransom]

I wouldn't say lots of people since I've never once downloaded a real book from a real publisher who used anything bigger than H3. There probably are a few, but I'd say they're rather rare. The only kind of titles I can imagine it working for are those that simply have a chapter number and no other writing. Just a great big "1" etc. Here's a few examples. The first one I did using H3 titles:



The next is from Azimov's Foundation novel I downloaed from Amazon last week. It seems to be H3 also.



This is from a novel by Eric Frank Russell called Wasp I just downloaded from Amazon last night. Seems also to be H3:



And last is one is a Sherlock Holmes book I got at this website about a month ago. It's probably H2 I'd say:



Aside from the fact that they screwed up the line spacing and left no spaces whatsoever between the chapter title and the text, that H2 font sticks out like a gaint in the land of fairies.

If you have an H2 or H1 font size for titles, many of them are going to run two lines--not very professional looking. For people who are just making books for themselves, I guess it doesn't matter, but if your goal is to make sellable books for download, I think it would pay to keep in step with what the industry is doing, and I don't think you're going to find many big-time publishers using huge H1 and H2 fonts in their titles. Yes, I can change it to whatever I want, but it's yet another step I have to go through. It would be a hassle for someone just learning the program. That said, it seems to me that if Calibre wants to be taken seriously by industry professionals it ought to stick to industry practices and make H3 and H2 the default for TOC titles like nearly everyone else rather than H2 and H1. It's just my opinion of course. But H1 is just huge. I can't imagine using that for anything.

[JSWolf]

Ransom, please edit your post and attach your photos. There are too many and they are overall too big. Thanks.

[Ransom]

And they cost mobileread nothing sitting on MY server. But if you'd rather force mobileread to pay for the web space, be my guest.

[WT Sharpe]

Thank you for using the attachment function, Ransom. It's appreciated that you were willing to use your own bandwidth, but they did look pretty big on some browsers.

[Ransom]

Okay. Sorry.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Ransom

The next is from Azimov's Foundation novel I downloaed from Amazon last week. It seems to be H3 also.

This is from a novel by Eric Frank Russell called Wasp I just downloaded from Amazon last night. Seems also to be H3:

And last is one is a Sherlock Holmes book I got at this website about a month ago. It's probably H2 I'd say:

If you have an H2 or H1 font size for titles, many of them are going to run two lines--not very professional looking.

I'm no expert so I may be off base, but I don't think you can tell by looking at a title if it is H1, H2 or H3. Heading tags do not control font sizes the CSS controls the font size, including heading sizes. Guessing what heading is being used by looking at it is meaningless. If you want to know what headings are being used unpack the book and look at them.

[JSWolf]

I have seen a number of ePub that use H1 or H2 and even sometimes H3 and in the CSS there is a specific size given for H1, H2, or H3 instead of using the default size. So even if you use H1, H2, or even H3, you can set the size you want.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I'm no expert ..., but

I'm also no expert, but I don't think of h1 and h2 as size markers at all. I think of them as a way to provide the ebook structure. In an html created for the web, it's usually one h1 per page. In ebooks, I may use h1's for each chapter title, or h1 for the book title and h2's for the chapters. I seldom use anything below h3 and often use only h1.

[Ransom]

Read the below post instead.

[Ransom]

Let me clarify that H1, H2, and H3 in an HTML editor will almost always use the same font as the regular text except larger and in bold. H1, H2, and H3 in a word processor and can be almost any font. Word 98 used to actually use Arial for headings and without putting them in bold. H3 produced an Arial 14 point non-bold type. So if you used Times 12 point for the body of the text (which was the default) and Arial 14 non-bold for the headings, there would be very little difference between the two in size. But a Times heading in 14 point bold is considerably larger than Times in 12 point regular, and this is still typically the default in HTML editors.

Of course you can change the heading values in your word processing app and HTML editor, but how many people do? I'm just saying that I think it would be wise to keep things as simple as possible for people. I'm not sure what the answer is on the headings thing now that I think of word processors being different in that regard.

I do think that programming Calibre to ignore super and subscript hyperlinks would be a good idea though. That way, people can use whatever size heading they want without having to worry about their footnote hyperlinks being treated as chapter headings (providing they use super/subscripts for the footnote numbers).

Oh well, it was just a thought.