2 cm left margin

[jtarnvik]

Hi!

I am trying to convert an epub book to mobi. The conversion seems to work but when I view the file on my Kindle 3 it has a 2 cm (1/2 inch I suppose) left margin on every line. The right margin is OK, ie more or less nothing. I have tried to adjust the margins when converting, but even setting them to 0 pt does not affect this. I assume there is an obvious setting somewhere which I am missing. Can someone please enlighten me as to what it is! Having a 6 inch Kindle screen is small enough, not using the entire screen seems utterly useless.

Regards
/Jesper

[toddos]

Perhaps the epub has the margin already set inside it? Try opening the epub using the "Tweak epub" option (shortcut: T) and look at the .css file to see if there are any large margins set. I find that a lot of epub books like to have 1em or even 2em margins, which depending on your font size could be around 2cm. Since I read on an iPhone and such large margins leave me with only 3-4 words per line on the small screen, I'm very sensitive to this and end up editing a lot of epubs to de-marginize them.

[jtarnvik]

Thank you, you were right. There was a 1,5 em margin in the css.

[cybmole]

could we have an idiots guide / step by step instructions for fixing this please i.e. for finding & then editing the css lines.

i have been fixing it by converting to .rtf and then to .mobi but ( as reported elsewhere) calibre's rtf output is buggy and sometimes creates a corrupt file.

[toddos]

Wow, that's about the most convoluted method I've ever heard of for fixing simple CSS issues

There are three ways you can go about doing this:

1. Use Calibre's "Tweak epub" option. This will expand the epub and open the temporary folder where the epub was expanded. Open the .css file (there should be only one) in your favorite text editor (or Notepad, if you have nothing else) and then look for any "margin-left" or "margin-right" entries.
2. Use an epub editor like Sigil. You can open the file directly from Calibre's storage folders. Use the "Open containing folder" option (shortcut key: O) to find the path to the folder, and then open the epub from that location in Sigil. As in 1, find the .css file in the list of files on the left in Sigil, and then look for any "margin-left" or "margin-right" entries.
3. Since epub is just a zip file renamed, you can do this manually as well. Go to the containing folder location (see 2 above), rename the .epub file to .zip ("foo.epub" would become "foo.zip"). Open this file with your favorite zip tool (or Windows Explorer) and extract the contents including all folders to a temporary working directory. Find the .css file and follow the rest of 1 above. When done, zip up all of the files/folders in the temporary folder (do not zip up the folder itself -- when you look at the final zip, the files should be at the root level), give it the same name as the original zip file, and then rename the extension back to .epub and copy it into Calibre's folder structure. It's probably best to keep a backup of the original epub until you've verified that your new one works.

Within the CSS file, my solution to margin problems is generally to remove the lines entirely. If I want any margins, I'll let Calibre add them on convert (usually go with 5pt all around). Also, make sure you don't accidentally remove any intentional indentation margins, such as for blockquote-type text. Unfortunately this is pretty difficult to do without context, since the class names are never descriptive (calibreN, where N is a number). This is why I like using option 2 above. I can search for a class name across all files in the epub and see where it's being used. From that, I can get enough context to understand what the class is intended to do, and thus whether or not I should remove margins.

Also note that this assumes all styles are put into a separate .css files. Most (all?) calibre conversions should not have any inline styles, but if you're working with a non-calibre-created epub (for example, an epub you've purchased from a store and liberated) you might find that some styles have been sprinkled around the HTML code. If this happens, you're basically screwed. You'll have to go through every single HTML file in the epub and verify that the inline styles are correct.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by toddos

Wow, that's about the most convoluted method I've ever heard of for fixing simple CSS issues

thanks for posting the "proper" way.

PS mine may be convoluted but it's a hell of a lot simpler & needs no extra software - if it were a race to produce say 10 fixed up .mobi books I'd be over the finishing line while you were still on book 1. & the newer contestants were still googling & downloading sigil :-)

but as my method occasionally fails it's good to know of an alternative.

[cybmole]

PS - one other thing I don't "get" about this issue.
When I view an offending book in it's .epub format with calibre viewer, there is no visible wide left margin, even though it contains css margins code. - does the calibre epub viewer intelligently ignore that code ? . IF so, then why does the calibre .mobi viewer not do the same thing ?

or to put it another wy , why is it a .mobi specific problem

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by cybmole

why is it a .mobi specific problem

Because of the way Kindle renders the ebook. Here is Kovids quick explanation.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

A quick explanation: Left margins in the MOBI format for the kindle can only be set in 2em blocks. That is a hard limitation of the Amazon MOBI renderer. So if you have a smaller left margin in your EPUB file, say 0.5em when translated to MOBI it becomes 2em.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by cybmole

thanks for posting the "proper" way.

PS mine may be convoluted but it's a hell of a lot simpler & needs no extra software - if it were a race to produce say 10 fixed up .mobi books I'd be over the finishing line while you were still on book 1. & the newer contestants were still googling & downloading sigil :-)

but as my method occasionally fails it's good to know of an alternative.

Really? You have to do two conversions (epub -> rtf, rtf -> epub), which takes time. If this were a race, I'd use Calibre's Tweak epub option to pop open each book, open the .css into Notepad (opens really quickly), find my offending left-margins and delete them, and be on the 10th book before you had finished your first conversion back from rtf to epub. And my books wouldn't suffer from potential conversion issues (it's not as bad as re-re-recompressing video, but you absolutely can run into formatting and character errors if you go back and forth between formats).

Good thing it's not a race

Also, why would anybody Google for Sigil? I provided a link. And I think you and I have had this discussion before, so obviously you're not going to change how you clean up your epubs. Just as I'm not going to change my view that you're pounding in a thumbtack with a sledgehammer.

[EowynCarter]

I usually open the ePub with 7zip (or any program able to read zip, that most OS will provide out of the box), edit css directly, and voila.
And sigil when i want to do some more serious editing.

[cybmole]

OK - I'm trying your method but failing to find the tweak epub feature :-( I have calibre open at the relevant book - cant see a suitable menu option anywhere ?

so tried 2nd route - could not get 7z to work - used winzip - found the css file margins - they look ok in there at 1st glance (5pt)

here's what is in the epub, ( via caliibre wizard)
[code]
</head>
<body text="#000000" link="#0000ff" dir="LTR" class="calibre">
<p class="western">
<span class="calibre1"><b class="calibre2">Excession</b></span></p>
<p class="calibre3">
Culture Book 4</p>
<p class="calibre3">
Iain M. Banks</p>
<p class="calibre4">
<br class="calibre5"/></p>
<p class="calibre6">
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote
corner of space, beside a trillion-year old dying sun from a
different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did
nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.</p>
<p class="calibre6">
Silent, motionless, and resisting all efforts to make contact, the
[code]

everything after culture book 4 Iain Banks gets indented in mobi, but not in epub viewer ???

so is it something to do with calibre 6 class ??

back to the css file - i guess I have to edit & save this chunk: ( which is using inches, not pts ? )

.calibre6 {
direction: ltr;
display: block;
margin-bottom: 0.02in;
margin-left: 0.1in;
margin-right: 0.1in;
margin-top: 0.02in;
orphans: 2;
text-align: LEFT;
text-indent: 0;
widows: 2


NB the styles go all the way up to calibre 15, + some other western ones. would I have to edit every style for consistency - look complex !

[ldolse]

The tweak epub feature is in the right-click menu for any given book, or just press the letter 't' on your keyboard.

The simplest approach is just to delete every line with 'margin-left' in the css file (it's highly unlikely to exist with every style), though if there was some book content that was actually supposed to be indented you will lose that - then again you've been losing it by converting to rtf, so it probably doesn't matter.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by cybmole

OK - I'm trying your method but failing to find the tweak epub feature :-( I have calibre open at the relevant book - cant see a suitable menu option anywhere ?

Right click on the selected book and choose tweak epub (see attached).

If you still don't see the option it means your version is older then 0.7.20 and you might want to consider upgrading.

[cybmole]

i see the menu option now, thanks & see how it works.

out of curiosity what happens if one just deletes the entire .css file ?

[user_none]

Originally Posted by cybmole

out of curiosity what happens if one just deletes the entire .css file ?

Almost to all formatting within the book will be gone. Width, hight, bold, italic, color, indentation... can all be (usually are) set via css.