blank lines between paragraphs

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by leftright

Surely the authors style and intent should be retained irrespective of medium used to read.

Like music, does one preserve the integrity of the artists intent or does one remix the content when "duplicating" the music?. Gapless music playback and normalising sound levels are but two examples of the war between purists and those who don't give a damn.

The problem with this is that most ebooks I've seen use the same classes for every ebook produced by that particular publisher. I don't really mind this (except for the gazillion unused classes left in the CSS), but to call this "art" is going a bit far. Once in a while I do find an ebook that someone has take some care with, but mostly it's pretty standard assembly-line classes, fonts, etc., and not particularly well-done, either.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by icallaci

The problem with this is that most ebooks I've seen use the same classes for every ebook produced by that particular publisher. I don't really mind this (except for the gazillion unused classes left in the CSS), but to call this "art" is going a bit far. Once in a while I do find an ebook that someone has take some care with, but mostly it's pretty standard assembly-line classes, fonts, etc., and not particularly well-done, either.

What I do is use Sigil or Calibre to remove unused classes. That can shrink the CSS (sometimes greatly) and make it a lot easier to edit the eBook to how I like it.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What I do is use Sigil or Calibre to remove unused classes. That can shrink the CSS (sometimes greatly) and make it a lot easier to edit the eBook to how I like it.

I do the same. Sometimes I wonder if I am changing the author's intent by removing fonts, changing spacing, fixing typos, etc., but I've decided that if the author's intent can be shoe-horned into a publisher's standardized CSS, then it can also be shoe-horned into MY standardized CSS just as easily.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by icallaci

I do the same. Sometimes I wonder if I am changing the author's intent by removing fonts, changing spacing, fixing typos, etc., but I've decided that if the author's intent can be shoe-horned into a publisher's standardized CSS, then it can also be shoe-horned into MY standardized CSS just as easily.

It's your right to have the book formatted so it's comfortable for you to read.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by icallaci

I do the same. Sometimes I wonder if I am changing the author's intent by removing fonts, changing spacing, fixing typos, etc., but I've decided that if the author's intent can be shoe-horned into a publisher's standardized CSS, then it can also be shoe-horned into MY standardized CSS just as easily.

That's pretty much my opinion. I have a look through the book, and the paper version if I have it, and see if they are trying for a particular look. If so, I try and maintain that while cleaning the code. But, if it appears to just simple formatting, I will format it how I like it.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by davidfor

That's pretty much my opinion. I have a look through the book, and the paper version if I have it, and see if they are trying for a particular look. If so, I try and maintain that while cleaning the code. But, if it appears to just simple formatting, I will format it how I like it.

Exactly my philosophy too.

[murg]

Originally Posted by icallaci

I almost always make scene breaks 2em to differentiate them from blockquotes (where I use a 1em top and 1em bottom space). It's getting to the point where I want all my ebooks formatted the same way, which is something I never thought about in paper books. I think it has something to do with the uniformity of the ereader versus the variety of printed books.

Because scene breaks can happen at the top or bottom of a page and be lost, I set mine to : <p class="center">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</p>

This way, they are always visible.

[murg]

Originally Posted by leftright

Surely the integrity of the authors style and intent should be retained irrespective of the medium used to read.

Like music, does one preserve the integrity of the artists intent or does one remix the content when "duplicating" the music?.

Most (it would almost be safe to say all here) authors write words, not formatting.

The design of a book is usually done by the publisher, without much input from the author.

There are some exceptions to this, such as Peter F Hamilton, who uses fonts and bold for alien language.

And frankly, if the author really is concerned about the integrity of the work, he/she can give it away, therefore not soiling the integrity of the work with the gummy soot of commerce.

And, in many cases, the publisher is the one not honouring the integrity of the work. Many ebooks I have have scan errors, misspellings, and other bad things.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by davidfor

That's pretty much my opinion. I have a look through the book, and the paper version if I have it, and see if they are trying for a particular look. If so, I try and maintain that while cleaning the code. But, if it appears to just simple formatting, I will format it how I like it.

Originally Posted by icallaci

Exactly my philosophy too.

Add me to that list as well. I've pretty much a standard look and feel that I apply unless, as davidfor says, I see the print edition making use of special formatting. An example would be using fonts installed on my Kobo for those times when the print edition makes use of special fonts. This makes the ebook non-portable but then no one but me should be reading those ebooks.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by murg

And, in many cases, the publisher is the one not honouring the integrity of the work. Many ebooks I have have scan errors, misspellings, and other bad things.

Or my all time favorite annoyance, the publisher who puts a blank line between each paragraph. Nah, no way they could set the paragraph CSS to give a bit of blank space, just too much like work. <end of attempt to be on topic for the thread>

The scan/OCR errors in old books that needed to be scanned since there was no electronic edition in those ancient times are not as annoying to me. I do think the publisher should have spent a bit more time on proofreading but at least I now have an ebook. Misspelling and misuse -- how many time have you seen your where you're was meant? -- are more annoying. Where is the blue pencilled Throop when you need him?

'Why does our culture consider supervising good work more deserving of respect and compensation than doing good work?' Kelvin R. Throop III

[Anak]

This topic resurfaces every once in awhile and I must admit it is fun to read. Although fun to read, lets stop justifying the unjustifiable.
The code Kobo adds to its kepubs should

1. unlock the font size
2. unlock the line height
3. unlock the page margins (left/right)
4. unlock text alignment

and nothing more.
The above settings can be adjusted by the user. Any other unintended side effects (i.e. blank line between paragraphs or ignoring explicitily intented blank lines) is just plain wrong. Not because I don't like it or because I do like it. I repeat, not because I don't like it or because I do like it. No, because it messes (I'm sure, unintended) with the intended layout of the book.

Users/readers who do like additional space are able to increase the line height (point 2 in the list above). That gives a similair effect (not 1:1 the same) and improves readability (at least that is what users say who do like the additonal blank line between paragraphs.)

Back to where it messes up the intended layout of the book.
Epub was originally designed for reflowable content, meaning that an epub reader can optimize text for a particular display device (yes, there is also a fixed layout but I'll skip this as that is a totally different topic/discussion).

Most fiction books contain blank lines to make clear that something has ended or something new is about to start. A good example are scenes in a chapter. Every single scene is usually seperated by a blank line: the scene break.
This is not different for a printed or an ebook. In both print and ebook, a scene is one continuous flow of text.

The problem for the broken code that Kobo inserts in its kepubs is that it breaks intended (deliberate and logical; I used a scene break as an example, but there are many more) book formatting which was carefully designed by the publisher.
The 'broken code' added to kepubs inserts an empty line before/after every paragraph, which can not be found in the original epub (Adobe epub) or printed edition of the book (both are designed by the publisher). And if you compare book and Adobe epub they are nearly indentical in the way they 'reflow' text. Not the exactly the same as a screen is slightly different than a sheet of paper. Identical in where (at certain positions) to expect a blank line (and are deliberately added by the publisher; i.e. before/after a scene: the scene break, before/after subheadings, etc.)
That's what goes wrong with kepub. There is hardly any distinction between anything as every paragraph is followed by a blank line. And you won't find a double blank line at a scene break. No, the deliberately insert blank line is ignored.

About the publishers
Are publishers not to blame? Sure they are. As DNSB mentioned in a previous post, in the old days publishers definitely messed things up with tons of easy to spot (and thus easy to fix) OCR errors but nowadays, ebooks aren't full of those errors anymore.
No, I'm not saying that ebooks are perfect now, but printed book are also not perfect as they too contain errors: spelling and grammar errors. Hopefully, just a few and hopefully get fixed by the publisher before a new print run. But don't count on it.

Today, you can still blame the publisher on how they format their books. Not that a digital editon looks different than the printed editon. They look very much alike.
You can blame publishers in the way they format their CSS. Too often you'll find that almost every property contains redundancies like font size, line heights, margins, etc. and creates inflexible ebooks.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Anak

The problem for the broken code that Kobo inserts in its kepubs is that it breaks intended (deliberate and logical; I used a scene break as an example, but there are many more) book formatting which was carefully designed by the publisher.

A lot of the eBook formatting is so far off from carefully designed. They are actually a right mess. I've done a lot of reformatting and what I've started with sometimes is a horrible mess. That's just the coding. Some the formatting is bad to start with. How they get away selling that is just wrong. They should be made to properly format eBooks. But they don't. They use the same sort of messy CSS and bad design styles/choices. There is nothing careful about it. If you've ever seen some of what I started with and what I ended up with, you'd be surprised at the differences.

We have issues like excessive margins, excessive indents, no indents, paragraph spaces that are too large, text set to start off quite small. offset text that is set to x-small or other just as bad font sizes, large wasted space for charter titles and other section headers/titles, poorly chosen fonts for embedding that do not work well with eInk, not enough space for a section break, some text set for left justify and some for full justify, spaces around em dashes, spaces around ellipse, simulated blockquotes with left/right margins too big and sometimes top/bottom margins too big and sometimes no right margin offset so it looks as bad as Mobi, incorrect encoding, and there are other issues. But to say this mess is carefully designed is doing a disservice to those who do know how to correctly format eBooks.

Carefully designed is the exception, not the norm.

[Anak]

@JSWolf. I read mostly Dutch books. I must say that 98% ebooks mimics the paper editon (as I tried to describe in my previous post) but all publishers use a default CSS that is to rigid and contains to much redundancies.

I used carefully formatted vs poorly formatted books. With carefully I don't meant to imply that that is the formatting I personally like.
I also make quite some changes to the CSS to get it right (for me).

I also read English books from time to time. Some titles I purchase, others I download first (if I don't know the author).
I have noticed that many of these English books contains lots of <div> formatting where I would expect a <p> formatting. I don't know if this is the default formatting that most US/CA/UK publishers use. Or that it is the result of a poor Calibre conversion. I'll never use Calibre to convert a book from one format to another (mobi > epub). But I've seen many downloads containing lost of "calibreXX" sh*t and those books are always poorly formatted.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Anak

I also read English books from time to time. Some titles I purchase, others I download first (if I don't know the author).
I have noticed that many of these English books contains lots of <div> formatting where I would expect a <p> formatting. I don't know if this is the default formatting that most US/CA/UK publishers use. Or that it is the result of a poor Calibre conversion. I'll never use Calibre to convert a book from one format to another (mobi > epub). But I've seen many downloads containing lost of "calibreXX" sh*t and those books are always poorly formatted.

I've purchased several ebooks that were not calibre conversions but did use <div> tags where I would have expected <p> tags. Some of them had poor formatting but that might be a matter of my opinion vs. the opinion of the creator of the ebook.

An example of what I considered poor formatting was having the first paragraph of a chapter followed by a .5em margin while following paragraphs have no bottom margin/padding. Other annoyances are having stray blank spans scattered through the chapter files, having your body declaration in the stylesheet in 4 separate chunks or using multiple blank lines at the end of a chapter often giving you a blank page between chapters.

Then there was a set of books my wife purchased. Unformatted cover image tucked into the upper right left corner of the screen followed by a blank page followed by the book title at the top of the page followed by a blank page followed by the book's author (again at the top of the page) followed by a blank page followed by the publisher's name and logo and yet another blank page. Eight pages into the book and you haven't even reached the table of contents. Given that all 5 ebooks had the same formatting, I was forced to conclude that someone thought this was attractive.

[Anak]

@DNSB. I'll understand your fustration.
If it not a Calibre conversion, then it must be something else. Is it possible that US publishers (and Canadian, UK too?) format their books for Kindle and convert that to epub? Without any form of post processing (read: clean up) auto conversions almost always gives very poor results.