indent size settings for Kindle

[cybmole]

does anyone know what em values are valid for use on Kindle.

I have been trying the remove paragraph spacings + set indent options on look and feel, and seem to be getting larger than expected indents when viewed on Kindle ?

1 em is worth about 2 lower case letters , yes ?
so default value of 1.5 should approximate a three letter indent.
i see 4 letter indents so maybe kindle rounds up ?

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by cybmole

does anyone know what em values are valid for use on Kindle.

I have been trying the remove paragraph spacings + set indent options on look and feel, and seem to be getting larger than expected indents when viewed on Kindle ?

1 em is worth about 2 lower case letters , yes ?
so default value of 1.5 should approximate a three letter indent.
i see 4 letter indents so maybe kindle rounds up ?

Personally what I do is set a paragraph margin top and bottom of 0.2em - just enough to separate the paragraph but not so much you barely fit any text on a page . I set the text-align to justify, and the text-indent to 1em.

Finally I also modified the Kindle margins itself using the instructions here - I can't remember whether I set it to 10 or 20.

[cybmole]

i remember reading several weeks ago, in this forum, something about fractional em indent settings limitations for Kindle but cannot find the thread

[kovidgoyal]

Kindle doesn't support fractional ems, they're rounded up.

[cybmole]

thanks - I thought it was something like that - so calibre's default 1.5 is treated as 2.0.

[NYCourtney]

Kovid,

I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out how my indent CSS is converted by Calibre for the Kindle. I've even run the debugging to see what it strips out and it completely takes out my third paragraph style for my third indent. I tried adding in a span class to keep it from doing this, to no avail.

It's an Index that requires tertiary entries that I'm creating. Here's the code I've been using in the ePub:

p.index1 {
font-family: "Verdana", "Geneva", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif !important;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: .75em;
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: left !important;
color: #000000;
margin: 0em 0em 0em 0em;
}
p.index2 {
font-family: "Verdana", "Geneva", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif !important;
font-weight: normal;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: .75em;
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: left !important;
color: #000000;
margin: 0em 0em 0em 1em !important;
}
p.index3 {
font-family: "Verdana", "Geneva", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif !important;
font-weight: normal;
font-size: 1em;
line-height: .75em;
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: left !important;
color: #000000;
margin: 0em 0em 0em 4em !important;
}
span.tertiary {
font-weight: normal;
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: left !important;
margin: 0em 0em 0em 4em !important;
}

This code finally forces three indent settings, but the third or "tertiary" indent still doesn't set the run over lines to the 4em margin. Only the first line hits at 4em. I've tried this combo on a matching "index3" and it didn't work either:

span.tertiary {
font-weight: normal;
text-indent: -4em;
text-align: left !important;
margin: 0em 0em 0em 4em !important;
}

Have you encountered this before? Is it a Kindle problem? I've spent over ten hours on it now. Please help if you can??? And THANK YOU so much if you can!!!

[kovidgoyal]

The kindle doesn't support indents at all. calibre fakes them by wrapping the indented html in blockquote elements. This has various limitations some of which come from the fact of using blockquotes others from bugs in the Kindle MOBI renderer.

If you want to understand what calibre is doing convert the generated MOBI file back to epub with the debug option and look at the debug-raw.html file in the input directory.

[NYCourtney]

THANK YOU so much for the "debug-raw.html" tip AS WELL as creating a piece of software so well suited for troubleshooting. I was able to figure it out! YOU ARE AWESOME!!!!

[kovidgoyal]

Glad you figured it out