View Single Post
Old 08-24-2012, 12:37 PM   #27
JSWolf
Resident Curmudgeon
JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.JSWolf ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
JSWolf's Avatar
 
Posts: 40,390
Karma: 21911957
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts
Device: Kobo Aura H2O, Sony PRS-650, Sony PRS-T1, nook STR, iPad 4, iPhone 5
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChaosInc View Post
The problem is, not everyone likes justified. I realize that books are normally justified, but specifying normal indents and no-indents, centering, drop-Caps, etc., is what the main question is. I wonder it it is a case of having combined styles in the docx, that says, <p class="noindent"><span align="center">* * *</span></p>, might be more in line with what Calibre needs for that style?
Calibre doesn't need anything specific. It works with what it is given.

the code there is excessive.

Code:
<p class="sectionbreak">* * *</p>
Code:
.sectionbreak {
margin-top: .75em;
margin-bottom: .75em;
text-align: center;
text-indent: 0
}
That's much nicer code.

Also, as far as using Word, don't. And if you do, forget the formatting. Use text markup to specify what styling you want to use. Take it out of Word as plain text into Sigil and work on it from there. It's a lot easier to modify a text file with text markup into a nicely looking ePub (using Sigil) then it is to try to fix all the mess Word makes.

As for indents and justify and whatnot, most people prefer a proper indents, justified, small to no margins and no paragraph spaces. As for the drop cap, that's fine too if you want. If you decide to use a large letter as the first letter of the paragraph, make sure you set a line-height to 0 or you can make the first line off spacing wise.

There are a lot of mistakes publishers make.
*wide margins
*indents too large (I've seen them as big as 5%) or none
*paragraph spaces and sometime big ones
*section breaks of only one line
*using a large first letter for the first paragraph in a new chapter/section and that first line of that paragraph being offset from the rest of the paragraph.
*incorrect size for simulated small caps.
*simulated small caps used without adjusting the line height so the lines spacing is all uniform
*left justified
*simulated blockquotes with the margins set incorrectly
*right justified with a margin that should not be there
*large space at the top of a chapter
*chapter headers too small or too large
*graphics that are unreadable such as a map
*generic crappy cover (so get a new cover commissioned)
*spaces abound em dashes

That's a fairly good list. And that doesn't take into account the asinine errors they end up putting in by someone who has no clue how to proofread. There are other things publisher do wrong, I do clean up the messes that they make so when I read, my reading is focused on the book, not how badly formatted the book is.
JSWolf is offline   Reply With Quote
 
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2196287&postcount=27
www.mobileread.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-22
13762
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:P3NNOD5HPBFOCO4BNDPEP4TTZLT6WCKF
<urn:uuid:302c5c14-43bb-43db-83a9-dcd96948d0a4>
2015-05-30T20:55:10Z
66.55.128.228
sha1:FX7RA55EF7KHR3K2UIZWDTG2ZASCFVVD
<urn:uuid:6a47d5b1-89d3-4c66-97b0-8210045dfe90>
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2196287&postcount=27
length
response
<urn:uuid:95c52c98-9b34-4916-8307-3de7aa5ace18>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-206-219.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-22
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf