Marvin, iOS8, and page breaks

[AlexBell]

Ever since I installed iOS8.1 on my iPad mini a couple of days ago I find that page break before and page break after do not work on ePub ebooks I have designed - an example is

Right at Last and Other Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell in the MobileRead library.

I uploaded this ebook before the recent iOS 'upgrade' and the page breaks worked then, and they still work on a Sony T3, Kobo Touch, Nexus 7 with Mantano, and upgraded Kindle keyboard. And the page breaks still work as expected on my iPad mini with iBooks and with Bluefire using iOS8.1

I design my ebooks by hand, and the HTML files and CSS validate to W3C standards; and the ePub validates with ePub-Checker.

Has anyone else seen this? The ebook I quoted above is quite small; could someone who has 'upgraded' to iOS8.1 please download it and check whether the page break problems occur on their iPad? You'll be able to tell quite easily: if the problem is present the ToC will show just below the cover and the Introduction will show just below the ToC instead of them being on separate pages.

[kguil]

You are right (I mentioned it in the release notes for version 2.8). You may have noticed that in the previous versions of Marvin on iOS 8, many books were taking an incredible amount of time to open and switch chapers. Some times this was in the order of minutes. I tracked down the problem to instructing iOS 8 WebKit to honour page breaking. I picked the lesser of two evils until I either find a workaround or realise there isn't one.

[AlexBell]

Thanks, Kris. I appreciate your prompt response, and hope you can find a fix. I certainly would hate to lose Marvin, but because of the often idiosyncratic structure Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins use in their books it would be very hard to design ebooks by them without page breaks.

PS Could you suggest a CSS based workaround for the time being? I can remember the time when one had to use <span></span> to get ePubs to work on iPads.

[kguil]

I don't know of one that would have the same effect. I'd actually welcome and feedback I can get about this. This is the problem: for any non-trivial amount of text setting the following:

webkitColumnBreakAfter='always', and webkitColumnBreakBefore='always'

...makes everything incredibly slow.

Note that I'm apply these iff pageBreakAfter and pageBreakBefore are set.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by kguil

I don't know of one that would have the same effect. I'd actually welcome and feedback I can get about this. This is the problem: for any non-trivial amount of text setting the following:

webkitColumnBreakAfter='always', and webkitColumnBreakBefore='always'

...makes everything incredibly slow.

Note that I'm apply these iff pageBreakAfter and pageBreakBefore are set.

I'm sorry, I don't understand.

I generally use page break before to start a new 'chapter' in a short story.

The CSS is:

.portion { page-break-before:always;
text-indent:0;
text-align:center;
font-size:138%;
margin:0; padding:20px 0 10px 0;}
p.portion+p {text-indent:0; }

and the HTML is something like:

<p class="portion">Chapter 2</p>

Is this what you mean?

[AlexBell]

I forgot to mention yesterday that I don't see any 'incredibly slow' problem when reading the same ebook on the same iPad with iOS8.1 using iBooks or Bluefire. Neither is anywhere near as good as Marvin as an ebook reader, but they honour page breaks without problem.

[AlexBell]

Any progress with this problem? I can't read the ebooks I design on Marvin, and miss it.