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Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

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Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#31

Post by MilanTodorovic »

jll29 wrote: post #20

Not to mention the ugly/unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust. Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it's automated by people who lack the specialized knowledge, or for whom it is not a priority (quarter century old bug reports, really?) suggests that in 2025, you should still avoid ebooks if you care about quality and aesthetics. This is a shame beca…

Have you tired KOreader[0]? It supports multiple ebook formats, including epub and cbz. You'll need to jailbreak[1] your Kindle though.

[0] http://koreader.rocks/ [1] https://github.com/notmarek/LanguageBreak

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#32

Post by chrismorgan »

fragmede wrote: post #15
chrismorgan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not pragmatism: that's poor judgement. That's a hack that shouldn't work at all; and if it does, it must¹ cause other problems, such as preventing breaks inside the entire first paragraph, or breaking graphically rather than linewise (that is, you could get the top half of one line on one page, and the rest on the next). — ¹ As in, it's unavoidable if you've implemented layout in such a way.

What's the name of this site again?

There are hacks and there are hacks. This is a bad hack, one that might fix a problem, but only by causing a worse problem.

On the positive side, on proper clients it will approximately do nothing.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#33

Post by pohuing »

tagawa wrote: post #29
WalterBright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

The downside of that is screenreaders can't read them out.

Alt texts are a thing on epubs. I would hope Amazon's format can do them as well.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#34

Post by elric »

I wouldn't be embarrassed about that particular ebook, it's probably the best looking one out there. The other 99% of ebooks however are atrocious.

I get that this isn't an easy problem to solve, with many different screen sizes, resolutions, and zoom levels. But the status quo is awful. I refuse to buy tech books in ebook format. Anything with any kind of diagrams (let alone actual pictures) is an automatic no because I know it'll suck.

My Kobo is pretty good for reading sci-fi tomes. Fantasy isn't as fun, as they often come with maps and the maps always render poorly.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#35

Post by nephanth »

acabal wrote: post #5

If you think it's bad that `break-*` isn't supported in Firefox or Chrome, wait till you see what your ebook looks like in Kindle, or worse, ADE-based readers, of which there are still many in use! Kindle, the reading device with by far the largest market share, is basically the IE6 of ereaders - too big to ignore, and at the same time dragging down the entire ebook ecosystem with its crappy renderer. Amazon has show…

When author mentioned their book has "javascript-driven syntax highlighting", my first thought was "no way this works on e-readers"

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#36

Post by dotancohen »

Izkata wrote: post #17
gorgoiler wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bottom of a page has room for a heading and 3 lines of text (or some number of lines that looks appealing) then that’s enough space for the heading to not be considered orphaned.

But without moving the paragraph up, there wouldn't be text there, just a big empty area.

As the author of the fine article states, that is preferable to the orphaned heading.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#38

Post by benmanns »

Most eBooks are produced by creating a new InDesign ebook document from the existing InDesign print document. Then you fiddle with a bunch of stuff to make it look right (removing the forced line breaks and such you did to get the print document looking how you want it, etc). That's then exported to ePub, which is a zip of some HTML, CSS, images, and fonts. The code outputted is absolutely terrible, as one used to get creating webpages with WYSIWYG Dreamweaver et al. and causes a lot of issues that have to be fiddled with in InDesign, manually corrected in the unzipped export, or frequently just left in the final book.

There really should be a better eBook specific authoring system. Ideally with importing from the print document, as that's the canonical version. It's just a website, after all, and we have great tools for building those.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#39

Post by WalterBright »

robin_reala wrote: post #30
WalterBright wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ship an ebook as a pdf file! Then no rendering problems.

But no reflow.

True, but if you're reading a book with equations in it, it is probably a textbook and textbooks are suited to large page, not pocketbook pages. You'd want a full size ereader anyway.

Leave the pocketbook size ereaders for the pocketbooks.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#40

Post by benmanns »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #23
p4bl0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the proposed approach would work, in particular on ebook readers. But if if does, I believe margins may not be the right way to do it. Padding might be however, because it is actually inside the box (while margins of elements may be "blended" inside the margins of their parents). h2 { padding-bottom: 3em; } h2 + p { margin-top: -3em; } The problem is CSS doesn't support the lh unit yet so what's 3em here…

>The problem is CSS doesn't support the lh unit yet so the problem is that ebooks css does not support what you expect a slightly out of date browser to support, and almost each ebook renderer has its own problems. Think html email sized problems.

Email rendering is a great analogy.
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