01-29-2010, 05:04 AM | #1 |
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left alignment revisited
Hi all,
My Kindle DX international arrived and I've been very happy with it. There is only one thing that is nagging me. I have a lot of non-drmed mobi books which I would like to read on my Kindle. The only problem is that they all show up justified (with straight right margin) which I think is horrible. My old Cybook shows the files with ragged right margin (which I like!). I know that Kindle will obey the internal formatting, and I have been converting them with Calibre but with strange results. The only thing that works is converting them to ePub with Calibre, then editing them with Sigil, and then converting them back to .mobi with Calibre . Most of the time, however, I loose the Table of Contents this way Do any of you know a better way to reformat the right margin to ragged? I don't want to wait for Amazon to put the left/right alignment choice back into the firmware... Thanks, Jan |
01-29-2010, 03:50 PM | #2 |
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Here is the odd part...and I have been grousing about this since day 1. The K1 DOES have justification enabled. And apparently, the code is still in the K2 firmware, you need to hack a justification code. So at this point, it becomes either all left-justified or all full-justified.
The fact that the justification code is still alive and well, just disabled, really, REALLY peeves me. I get manual landscape mode..big whoop. But I don't get justification control. Go figure. |
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02-11-2010, 01:54 PM | #3 |
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I've done it messily by going back to the HTML and inserting "align=left" into (literally) every <p> or whatever. Putting it into the style definition at the top of the file didn't work. It's obviously a ludicrous waste of space but it did do the job.
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02-16-2010, 05:51 AM | #4 |
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it works !
Sorry that I didn't follow it up here, but in another thread (calibre) I posed the same question, and I learned that with the newest version (...37 or something) Calibre conversions with the no justification option on will now do the job !! Previous versions did not. All my mobi's are left aligned now.
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02-16-2010, 07:51 AM | #5 | |
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Quote:
Last edited by Jonas777; 02-16-2010 at 10:40 AM. |
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02-16-2010, 08:44 AM | #6 |
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02-16-2010, 09:03 AM | #7 |
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The easiest way to get left justified is to read ePub with your 505.
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02-16-2010, 01:41 PM | #8 | |
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Quote:
The issue (assuming this is a serious inquiry) is that the Kindle forces full justification, that is, the text fully extends from the left to the right. So if there are not enough letters in a line, the Kindle will force the words to be unnaturally spread to make the text reach the right margin. Left-justification, or ragged-right, allows the right margin to end where the line would naturally end, with no unnatural forcing of spaces. Since the K1 had the option for ragged-right, and the code apparently still exists in the K2, but not turned on, this is an irk for some people, including me. |
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02-17-2010, 07:08 AM | #9 |
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What's so terrible about full justification? It's been used in books and newspapers for centuries.
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02-17-2010, 07:37 AM | #10 |
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There are those who consider that the small size of the screen, combined with lack of decent hyphenation support, mean that fully justified documents do not look very nice, and prefer left-justification. Certainly not me, though!
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02-17-2010, 04:03 PM | #11 | |
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Also, the main - in fact only- reason for full justification is to allow columnar text on pages. Put three or four or five columns on a page and the text needs to be fully justified. No such requirement for a one-column format such as the Kindle. This is a matter of preference, but the awkward word spacing of forced justification where not needed, and is avoidable, is irksome to me. So, Amazon expends the effort to allow landscape mode - a dubious benefit - yet does not bother to turn back on justification. Must be a reason.... Don |
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02-20-2010, 08:27 AM | #12 |
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If you really want left justification, get a Sony Reader PRS-600 and you can start reading ePub in gloriously left justified.
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02-20-2010, 10:47 AM | #13 |
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Curious, then, that 99.99% of the world's books use full justification, don't you think?
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02-20-2010, 11:06 AM | #14 | |
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Quote:
Reflowable formats just as ePub or Mobi don't do any of this sort of complex formatting, so the text looks like crap compared to a PDF generated by InDesign or TeX. Thus, many people want to just have their right margins ragged so they don't have those annoyingly large gaps between words. |
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02-20-2010, 11:16 AM | #15 | |
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None of this is done in ebooks. In fact, my experience with ebooks purchased from major publishers is that they are not proofread at all. The choice appears to be between ragged right margins, and erratic and unpredictable spacing between words— sometimes ending up with two short words on a line. I'll take the ragged right margin. Mike Last edited by JMikeD; 02-20-2010 at 11:17 AM. Reason: Tamned dypos |
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