Finding the perfect paragraph indentation size

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Argon

Is ragged right that much better? I keep flipping back and forth between the two options on my Kindle. Why ragged right when physical books are almost all justified?

1) Physical books have higher resolution than eInk, and 2) they can always hyphenate words since a human can tell it where if the software can't figure it out. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong in my CSS but my Kobo never hyphenates with ragged right. I think it does when lines are set to justified but it's still not as good as a printed book. As a result with justified text you'll see lines that have wonky (very noticeable) spacing between words. With ragged right it just starts a new line when the next word doesn't fit, and there's consistent space between the words. Do a google search for "daisy consortium ragged right" and you'll see the arguments for why it's better.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Argon

I'm pretty sure that's what I want. The indentation should be a certain unchanging proportion of the line/paragraph width, no?

Imagine if you were to zoom in on the text. For example, with firefox you can zoom in and out on the page with ctl + and ctl -. Go to

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6122...-h/61221-h.htm

and scroll down to the body text and use ctl + and notice that the indentation stays the same relative to the text size, about the width of 2 letters. Using percent the indentation would get smaller as you zoom in. Which to me, at least, would be weird.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by hobnail

1) Physical books have higher resolution than eInk, and 2) they can always hyphenate words since a human can tell it where if the software can't figure it out. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong in my CSS but my Kobo never hyphenates with ragged right. I think it does when lines are set to justified but it's still not as good as a printed book.

ePub seems to do a much better job with hyphenation and justified text than kepub. Often kepub leaves large gaps between words on justified text. I don't know why Kobo doesn't work on improving kepub layout since it is their own format.

How do Kindles do with hyphenation and justified text? Does it look as good as epub layout looks on my Nook?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

ePub seems to do a much better job with hyphenation and justified text than kepub. Often kepub leaves large gaps between words on justified text. I don't know why Kobo doesn't work on improving kepub layout since it is their own format.

How do Kindles do with hyphenation and justified text? Does it look as good as epub layout looks on my Nook?

With your Kobo, are you using the hyphenation dictionary that Kobo supplies? If so, that's a good reason for the poor hyphenation with KePub. But one thing ePub does better then KePub is variable space between words.

[ps67]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

ePub seems to do a much better job with hyphenation and justified text than kepub. Often kepub leaves large gaps between words on justified text. I don't know why Kobo doesn't work on improving kepub layout since it is their own format.

How do Kindles do with hyphenation and justified text? Does it look as good as epub layout looks on my Nook?

Different language but Kindle has a good hyphenation and justified text. Of course with the book purchased from Amazon and the ones converted in KFX format. I don't own a Nook so I can't do the comparison.

[Argon]

Originally Posted by hobnail

1) Physical books have higher resolution than eInk, and 2) they can always hyphenate words since a human can tell it where if the software can't figure it out. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong in my CSS but my Kobo never hyphenates with ragged right. I think it does when lines are set to justified but it's still not as good as a printed book. As a result with justified text you'll see lines that have wonky (very noticeable) spacing between words. With ragged right it just starts a new line when the next word doesn't fit, and there's consistent space between the words. Do a google search for "daisy consortium ragged right" and you'll see the arguments for why it's better.

Kindle's KFX format uses their proprietary typsetting engine they call Enhanced Typesetting, which seems to give a very good result, hyphenation and all. I couldn't find any results searching that ^. Can you post a link?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ps67

Different language but Kindle has a good hyphenation and justified text. Of course with the book purchased from Amazon and the ones converted in KFX format. I don't own a Nook so I can't do the comparison.

And if you do not care about KFX, you can use the Hyphenate This! plugin to hyphenate KF8 eBooks. That works well. They one thing you don't get is kerning (i the font supports it).

[Argon]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Imagine if you were to zoom in on the text. For example, with firefox you can zoom in and out on the page with ctl + and ctl -. Go to

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6122...-h/61221-h.htm

and scroll down to the body text and use ctl + and notice that the indentation stays the same relative to the text size, about the width of 2 letters. Using percent the indentation would get smaller as you zoom in. Which to me, at least, would be weird.

I think you have it backwards. Isn't em a unit derived from that text's font size? I thought % was a fixed proportion of the line width. That page's behavior works exactly like what I would prefer.

[Argon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And if you do not care about KFX, you can use the Hyphenate This! plugin to hyphenate KF8 eBooks. That works well. They one thing you don't get is kerning (i the font supports it).

jhowell's KFX Output plugin works very well for conversion to KFX and I've used it for all of my Calibre-edited books I load onto my Kindle.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Argon

I think you have it backwards. Isn't em a unit derived from that text's font size? I thought % was a fixed proportion of the line width. That page's behavior works exactly like what I would prefer.

% is a proportion of the container which is this case is a % of the screen width. So an indent is 5% of the width of the screen and it looks AWFUL!

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Argon

Kindle's KFX format uses their proprietary typsetting engine they call Enhanced Typesetting, which seems to give a very good result, hyphenation and all. I couldn't find any results searching that ^. Can you post a link?

Maybe it was the w3c but I could swear it was Daisy.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G169.html

Here are some others that I found:

https://a11y-101.com/design/text-alignment

http://mediaaccess.org.au/accessible...-in-documents/

https://webaim.org/techniques/textlayout/

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Argon

I think you have it backwards. Isn't em a unit derived from that text's font size? I thought % was a fixed proportion of the line width. That page's behavior works exactly like what I would prefer.

Yeah, I was wondering if I'd had it backwards after I sent that. Regardless, to me I want the indentation to be consistent; whatever letter/text is above or below the indented text should stay in that place when the text is zoomed in our out.

Try making a simple web page with the lorem ipsum text and set the paragraph indentation at 5% and another page with the indentation at 1.5em. Name the files percent.html and em.html then they'll open in your web browser. If you normally have your browser maximized make it a regular window and resize its width. Watch how the indentation changes in the percent file while it stays the same with the em file. If you prefer that varying indentation then that's fine but you don't want to upload public domain books using percent based indentation here or wherever because it's nonstandard and few people like that.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

With your Kobo, are you using the hyphenation dictionary that Kobo supplies? If so, that's a good reason for the poor hyphenation with KePub. But one thing ePub does better then KePub is variable space between words.

No, I'm using yours. It helps, but kepub still doesn't look as good as ePub on Nook. Thing is, there are other positives about using kepub on Kobo, so I still use the format.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Argon

Isn't em a unit derived from that text's font size?

I thought 1 em is literally the width of an 'm'?

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I thought 1 em is literally the width of an 'm'?

When I first learned it an em was a vertical measurement, the height of a lowercase m character, and an ex was a horizontal measurement that was the width of a lowercase x. I have no idea how things got messed up. That's assuming I'm remembering correctly; it was long ago.