Finding the perfect paragraph indentation size

[gmw]

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

[...] It would also need carefully dried and not dunked in salt or dirty water as there could be electrochemical action of the gold on the USB attacking other bare metals. [...]

One of the points of using gold is that it is one of the least reactive elements. It seems extremely unlikely that anyone would immerse their e-readers in the sorts of substances that might cause an electrochemical reaction with the gold.

[Quoth]

In the presence of an electrolyte the gold causes any LESSER metal to be corroded at an accelerated rate.
Hence gold connectors should only used with gold and tin to tin plug in cards are far more reliable than gold to tin.

So the USB socket is fine and obviously can't be coated or it wouldn't work with the plug. In any conductive liquid the gold causes accelerated corrosion of the aluminium and tin.

Stainless steel bolts on an aluminium structure can cause the aluminium to rot, for a similar reason, so historically the stainless steel was cadmium plated, or the aluminium had an epoxy coating.

Any bathwater or saltwater immersion will result in increased rate of corrosion of any exposed reactive metals BECAUSE the gold is there.
You can test this at home with and wiithout a wedding ring and various metal in regular salt solution, vinegar, baking soda water, coca-cola (has phosphoric acid) and dissolved bath salts.
You can even make a primitive battery with gold , lemon juice and zinc. The gold isn't harmed at all! It might get a bit zinc plated, but it will polish off.
https://blog.samtec.com/post/dissimi...ng-connectors/

"Improper use of aluminum in contact with stainless steel had caused rapid corrosion in the presence of salt water"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion

The best waterproofing concept is keeping the liquid out. So professional gear designed for immersion uses a neoprene sealing ring compressed slightly by a precision screw on cover, or a cover held by screws exterior to the sealed contents with an elastomer seal between the two halves.
The original H2O had a push on cover with sealing ring, a membrane at the power button and double sided single piece waterproof sticky tape for the main cover. It wasn't very reliable and the main cover could easily get slightly peeled. The small cover would wear.
The Libra H2O's HZO system is even cheaper and because dust, grit dirt and liquid can get inside, especially via the front buttons and the USB socket, it's only for accidental dunking. The back can easily be popped off with a thumbnail starting at the corner diagonal from the power button.

It's a lovely eReader but the case and waterproofing could have been better. It's a really cheap design compared to screen and electronics.

[gmw]

This happens not "BECAUSE the gold is there", it is because there are dissimilar metals present. Your posts suggest this is something specific to the use of gold. Dissimilar metals tend to be present because there are differing structural requirements.

But yes, I always imagined water-proofing of e-readers was intended for accidental dunking rather than taking your scuba diving instructions for a swim. If you are not leaving the device soaking in an electrolytic solution the problem of preferential corrosion is minimal - your other points of dust and grit etc. are much more likely to cause a problem.

[Argon]

Originally Posted by jhowell

It should be 1.6em. If you have a counter example I would very much like to see it.

(If you can supply the title/ASIN of a book, I can take a look at the free sample and see what is going on with it.)

Attached are, respectively, quick pictures of my Kindle with A Fire Upon the Deep—which I'm using as a reference standard, whose style sheet says 5%—and The Wandering Inn with this globally added (as well as a line-height adjustment):

p {
text-indent: 0%
}
p + p {
text-indent: 5%
}

https://imgur.com/gallery/Tsldhwi

The Wandering Inn's indentation looks bigger to me, and A Fire Upon the Deep's doesn't look like 1.6em to me. What do you think?

[ZodWallop]

One thing is for certain: If reading in the tub or by the swimming pool, it is safer to use a waterproof 2015 Nook Glowlight Plus than it is to use a non-waterproof Kobo Clara.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Argon

Attached are, respectively, quick pictures of my Kindle with A Fire Upon the Deep—which I'm using as a reference standard, whose style sheet says 5%—and The Wandering Inn with this globally added (as well as a line-height adjustment):

p {
text-indent: 0%
}
p + p {
text-indent: 5%
}

https://imgur.com/gallery/Tsldhwi

The Wandering Inn's indentation looks bigger to me, and A Fire Upon the Deep's doesn't look like 1.6em to me. What do you think?

That sort of code can make looking at the HTML code more difficult. If you have <p> as...

p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  text-indent: 1.2em;
}

Then you'll see when <p> has no indent when you see <p class="noindent">. Most <p> will be with an indent.

[Argon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That sort of code can make looking at the HTML code more difficult. If you have <p> as...

p {
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  text-indent: 1.2em;
}

Then you'll see when <p> has no indent when you see <p class="noindent">. Most <p> will be with an indent.

I barely know any CSS or HTML. I just followed the commenter's suggestion from this: https://ebookconversion.paulbrookes....agraph-styles/

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Argon

my Kindle with A Fire Upon the Deep—which I'm using as a reference standard, whose style sheet says 5%

I took a look at the free sample available on Amazon for A Fire Upon the Deep.

It is coded with text-indent:5%, but it also has a body style of margin-right:25px, which slightly reduces the overall page width. Because of that, for this book the KFX text-indent becomes 1.55em instead of 1.6em.

Originally Posted by Argon

A Fire Upon the Deep's doesn't look like 1.6em to me.

I was able to duplicate your photo on my Kindle using a font size of 1.

I used a screenshot from my Kindle Oasis 2 (touch opposite corners to generate) with a test book containing m-dashes and determined that at size 1, 1em = 29px on my screen.

A text-indent of 1.55em should be 45px and that is what I measured in for A Fire Upon the Deep. So it is working as expected for me.

Originally Posted by Argon

The Wandering Inn's indentation looks bigger to me

The Wandering Inn indent (1.6em) should look slightly larger than A Fire Upon the Deep (1.55em). It is hard to judge from photographs.

[Argon]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I took a look at the free sample available on Amazon for A Fire Upon the Deep.

It is coded with text-indent:5%, but it also has a body style of margin-right:25px, which slightly reduces the overall page width. Because of that, for this book the KFX text-indent becomes 1.55em instead of 1.6em.



I was able to duplicate your photo on my Kindle using a font size of 1.

I used a screenshot from my Kindle Oasis 2 (touch opposite corners to generate) with a test book containing m-dashes and determined that at size 1, 1em = 29px on my screen.

A text-indent of 1.55em should be 45px and that is what I measured in for A Fire Upon the Deep. So it is working as expected for me.



The Wandering Inn indent (1.6em) should look slightly larger than A Fire Upon the Deep (1.55em). It is hard to judge from photographs.

Wow, thanks so much! That's very interesting. I may remove that margin before reading AFUtD, then. Why do publishers add strange formatting like that? Wouldn't it be in their interest to let readers adjust the Kindle margin themselves?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Argon

Wow, thanks so much! That's very interesting. I may remove that margin before reading AFUtD, then. Why do publishers add strange formatting like that? Wouldn't it be in their interest to let readers adjust the Kindle margin themselves?

I think they do it like that because of the way ADE used to work. ADE used to have a page number on the right and you needed a margin of some size to not overwrite the page number. That was a forced page number. Now that that's not an issue, they still don't adjust for the last of the page number. Another reason they may still do it is because Amazon uses such large margins.

I agree that there are some things that need to be left at default such as L/R margins, base font size, and line-height. But they don't so I go in to fix the mess they make. And the chapter headings are (in most cases) a waste of screen space.

[Kamikuza]

If the book has blockquotes, 1.2em for a “square” indent relative to line height, even is the indents of the block quote are greater. If there are no full width blockquotes, 1.55em because ...

I restyle the ebooks I get to simplify the CSS and make them look more like the paper books...

[Argon]

Can anyone help me with this?

I downloaded the ePub of the Free Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for Nook and Kindle, and the formatting it comes with is blank line spaces between paragraphs and no indentation, so I added

p {
text-indent: 0em;
}
p + p {
text-indent: 1.25em;
}

(Now, keep in mind, I don't really know CSS, so I'm sure this was a ham-fisted way to go about things, but it worked in another ebook.)

Well, there were a lot of initial lines of introductory matter in the beginning of the chapters (the year of publication or epigraphs) that shouldn't be indented, and the lines immediately following block quotes that should be indented, so in the Calibre editor, I added <div> and <p></p> liberally, like so (all paragraphs are their own <p>)

<p>Epigraph that is not indented, with a blank line between it and the next paragraph <div></p>
<div>
<p>First paragraph that is not indented</p>
<p>Second and consecutive paragraphs that are indented</p>

and

<blockquote>Blockquote text, no indent<blockquote>
<p></p>
<p>First line of paragraph following blockquote that is indented</p>
<p>Consecutive paragraphs that are also indented</p>

And it worked...in the Calibre editor. When I converted it to KFX with jhowell's plugin and side-loaded it onto my Kindle, the result was no indentation anywhere and three spaces between paragraphs.

Is there a simple way to modify the HTML or CSS to make it do what I want as a KFX? (I believe there were no <div> or <p></p> before I added them, so a simple find and replace shouldn't be cumbersome, if it's necessary to undo what I added.)

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Argon

Can anyone help me with this?

Not answering your question, or maybe it will work if you did it this way, but I prefer to have my divs not be generic and assign specific classes to them. My top level formatting for blocks that are separate from the running text is

div.block {
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    margin-top: 1em;
    width: 85%;
}

Then for the paragraphs within and after them

div.block + p {
    margin-top: 1em;
}

div.block p {
    margin-top: 0.25em;
    text-indent: 0em;
}

Then for a specific type of block, e.g., an article

div.article {
    font-family: sans-serif;
}

Then in the html it's a double-barrelled class 'div class="block article"'.

Alternatively you could dispense with the block class and chain all of the different div types together for the common stuff; e.g.

div.article, div.note, div.letter {
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    margin-top: 1em;
    width: 85%;
}

and then have div.article the same as above.

[Argon]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Not answering your question, or maybe it will work if you did it this way, but I prefer to have my divs not be generic and assign specific classes to them. My top level formatting for blocks that are separate from the running text is

div.block {
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    margin-top: 1em;
    width: 85%;
}

Then for the paragraphs within and after them

div.block + p {
    margin-top: 1em;
}

div.block p {
    margin-top: 0.25em;
    text-indent: 0em;
}

Then for a specific type of block, e.g., an article

div.article {
    font-family: sans-serif;
}

Then in the html it's a double-barrelled class 'div class="block article"'.

Alternatively you could dispense with the block class and chain all of the different div types together for the common stuff; e.g.

div.article, div.note, div.letter {
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
    margin-top: 1em;
    width: 85%;
}

and then have div.article the same as above.

I don't think I understand. Did you understand the nature of my question? My primary problem lies in the KFX plugin's conversion of my ordinary, non-blockquote paragraphs.

[JSWolf]

@Argon, forget that Lovcraft book you downloaded. It's very poorly made. It's going to be a lot of work to fix. There are some Lovecraft books in the Mobileread library.