Kindle Fire woes... indent and media Queries

[Oxford-eBooks]

I thought that since I'm having an easy day nursing a nasty cold that I'd have a play with my poetry CSS.

But I'm noticing some REAL wierd stuff on the Kindle Fire in the Amazon previewer.

Here's some CSS for a simple three level indent from my stylesheet. I'll get to hanging indents later...

p.poetry1 {text-align:left !important; text-indent: 0em !important; margin-left: 3em !important;}
p.poetry2 {text-align:left !important; text-indent: 0em !important; margin-left: 4em !important;}
p.poetry3 {text-align:left !important; text-indent: 0em !important; margin-left: 5em !important;}

@media amzn-kf8{
p.nothing{text-align:left;}
p.poetry1 {text-align:left; margin-left: 3em; color:#f00;}
p.poetry2 {text-align:left; margin-left: 4em; color:#0f0;}
p.poetry3 {text-align:left; margin-left: 5em; color:#00f;}
}

@media amzn-mobi{
p.poetry1 {text-align:left !important; text-indent:-20px;}
p.poetry2 {text-align:left !important; text-indent:-40px;}
p.poetry3 {text-align:left !important; text-indent:-60px;}
}

Now, this works fine in ADE and on the Kindle. I've put some colours in to make sure that the media queries are working for Kindle Fire, yep, coloured text on the Fire.

Two WIERD problems:

1. My KF8 poetry1 style (well, the colour) is IGNORED unless I have a sacrificial style "nothing" at the start of the block - that CAN'T be right, I must be doing something badly wrong here.
2. I really can't get indents on the Kindle previewer for Kindle Fire to work. All three paragraphs come out with the same indent.



Any clues for my flu-addled brain?

Andy

[Oxford-eBooks]

ah... okay, looks like the

@media amzn-kf8{

line was throwing things and breaking the subsequent line...

(pass the lemsip)

[DiapDealer]

So it's working fine, now? I'm not sure I follow what was going wrong and/or what fixed it. Was there a space needed immediately following amzn-kf8 before the '{' or something?

[Oxford-eBooks]

No, not working. SOMETHING wierd is happening, the first style in the block is still getting ignored. Even if I put the '{' on the next line.
Driving me crazy, because I can't see what I'm doing wrong here...

[DiapDealer]

Your exact code works fine for me. Even when removing the "p.nothing{text-align:left;}" line, the colors and indents appear as expected when viewing with the Kindle Previewer in Fire mode.

The amzn-mobi part doesn't appear to be working correctly for me... or rather I should say the higher-priority default settings (text-indent and margin-left) seem to be conspiring with the less prioritized negative text-indents in the amzn-mobi section to make the three lines all indented equally as much... at what appears to be three ems.

[Oxford-eBooks]

I've just tried swapping MobiGen for KindleGen in my toolchain and I'm now getting more promising results!
Not quite there yet, but at least thinge seem a little more under control.

[Oxford-eBooks]

Interesting...

It seems that if you do:

@media not amzn-mobi {
.poetry1 {text-align:left !important; text-indent: 0em !important; margin:0 0 0 3em; color: #ff0;}
.poetry2 {text-align:left !important; text-indent: 0em !important; margin:0 0 0 4em; color: #0ff;}
.poetry3 {text-align:left !important; text-indent: 0em !important; margin:0 0 0 5em; color: #f0f;}
}

On ADE, the first style is ignored, but on Calibre and iBooks all three styles work just fine... sigh.

[Oxford-eBooks]

... a good day for getting to the bottom of some old legacy problems. There was I thinking that -ve text-indents weren't supported in the new KindleGen, when I found a

text-indent:1em !important;

in my base paragraph style.
A hangover from when I put those in to get Stanza to stop over-riding nearly all the formatting.


... ahh, the world makes more sense now.

[DiapDealer]

ADE has no idea what those amzn media queries are. So I doubt it knows how to even interpret not amzn-mobi. But I can't say for sure.

That's why I use the @import method and use three completely separate CSS files: one for ePub, and one each for MOBI and KF8. That way, I just comment out or delete the amzn-* lines to publish the ePub or vice-versa for building the MOBI.

[Oxford-eBooks]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

ADE has no idea what those amzn media queries are. So I doubt it knows how to even interpret not amzn-mobi. But I can't say for sure.

I'd have thought that a SENSIBLE strategy would have been to ignore any media queries that aren't understood. So @media amzn-mobi or @media some-brand-new-device would just be ignored on ADE as they probably just wouldn't apply. Otherwise, how could it be future-proof?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Oxford-eBooks

I'd have thought that a SENSIBLE strategy would have been to ignore any media queries that aren't understood. So @media amzn-mobi or @media some-brand-new-device would just be ignored on ADE as they probably just wouldn't apply. Otherwise, how could it be future-proof?

You could very well be right. It may work exactly that way. I've never tested it myself. I just choose not to even expose ADE to anything it could conceivably stumble over. Hence my entirely separate CSS files method. My ePub css has no MOBI-building lingo in it.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Oxford-eBooks

I'd have thought that a SENSIBLE strategy would have been to ignore any media queries that aren't understood. So @media amzn-mobi or @media some-brand-new-device would just be ignored on ADE as they probably just wouldn't apply. Otherwise, how could it be future-proof?

It is a known problem with ADE. If you feed it a CSS that has bad statements or statements it does not understand it will ignore the whole file.

Dale