Saving text formatting to use across books

[m00min]

Originally Posted by Faterson

The only thing to readjust in Marvin is paragraph spacing. That's it. If you need to readjust anything else, it's an issue with your particular books' code, ...

I'm struggling to understand how you feel that having to click a button six or so times on every new ebook is something that I would want to do.

Have I at any point said I needed to adjust anything other than the theme colours and font? Changing the colours is great for reading in different conditions and I prefer to choose a font in my reader rather than embed one. I read my books on a Sony, Nook, and in Marvin so using a font installed with the reader seemed like the better, more widely supported choice.

As for your insistence that my CSS is being reinterpreted, I'm wondering if the 0.75 value is being floored down to 0.

I'll have a read through the Github issue when I'm not procrastinating on my iPad.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by m00min

I'm struggling to understand how you feel that having to click a button six or so times on every new ebook is something that I would want to do.

I'm struggling to understand how you feel that having to do that a couple of times per week, or once in 2 weeks, is something that one would feel the need to launch a MobileRead thread about. Besides, you're exaggerating: usually just a couple of presses will do -- 6 sounds like an extreme case.

Most of all, though, this entire thread is irrelevant for 99.99% of Marvin users out there. We are talking about publisher vanity here, not a regular reader issue. Please don't take this as a criticism of your person -- I'm just calling it what it is. You have created some e-books, and are upset they do not instantly display 100% as you wish to see them displayed. 99.99% of Marvin users don't have those issues, because they don't publish e-books -- they have no idea that e-books contain any code. What 99.99% of Marvin users, ordinary readers, care about, is whether they can fully adjust the display of e-books to suit their personal preferences, and in Marvin, they can. They couldn't care less about the publisher's preferences, nor should they care.

Originally Posted by m00min

Have I at any point said I needed to adjust anything other than the theme colours and font?

Sigh. Again, m00min, you are apparently conflating "Publisher's Settings" with "Marvin's formatting". As explained several times already, you never need to readjust your theme colours and fonts. You set them once, and they automatically carry over from book to book, with 100% fidelity. You, apparently, keep switching between "Publisher's Settings" and "Marvin's formatting", and then complain things don't work for you. Just stop going to those Publisher's Settings, and everything will work fine for you in Marvin. The only thing you will potentially need to readjust, will be paragraph spacing, and Kris gave a perfectly valid reason earlier in this thread as to why paragraph spacing is not automatically carried over from book to book. You will also be reading books created by other people in your Marvin, won't you?

Originally Posted by m00min

As for your insistence that my CSS is being reinterpreted, I'm wondering if the 0.75 value is being floored down to 0.

Yup, that's what appears to be happening. What happens if you change your 0.75em value to, for example, 1.75em? Marvin should definitely reflect that, even in "Marvin's formatting".

I'm no CSS expert, just an amateur, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the default paragraph spacing in HTML is a half-line, or 6 points, which would be 1em. You now wish to further decrease that by 25%, so your preferred paragraph spacing appears to be 4.5 points. That's such tiny paragraph spacing, that "Marvin's formatting" may well decide it's so close to zero it might as well initially display it as zero, and I believe that's a legitimate, common-sense interpretation. After all, anyone can easily bump up the zero spacing to something else, if they dislike the zero paragraph spacing. (And I'm with you on that -- I hate it, too.)

[m00min]

Originally Posted by Faterson

I'm struggling to understand how you feel that having to do that a couple of times per week, or once in 2 weeks, is something that one would feel the need to launch a MobileRead thread about. Besides, you're exaggerating: usually just a couple of presses will do -- 6 sounds like an extreme case.

It's getting very tiring this constant questioning of what I'm seeing / experiencing. I'm typically having to hit the "increase paragraph spacing" six times. I have not exaggerated this as the number of times I'm pressing the button might itself be indicative of whatever problem I'm having.

Originally Posted by Faterson

Most of all, though, this entire thread is irrelevant for 99.99% of Marvin users out there. We are talking about publisher vanity here, not a regular reader issue. Please don't take this as a criticism of your person -- I'm just calling it what it is. You have created some e-books, and are upset they do not instantly display 100% as you wish to see them displayed. 99.99% of Marvin users don't have those issues, because they don't publish e-books -- they have no idea that e-books contain any code. What 99.99% of Marvin users, ordinary readers, care about, is whether they can fully adjust the display of e-books to suit their personal preferences, and in Marvin, they can. They couldn't care less about the publisher's preferences, nor should they care.

Well I'm so sorry I've published something before checking with you as to its suitability. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that given there is an entire forum dedicated to Marvin asking a question here would be ok.

I don't know why you insist on referring to me as a publisher, I'm not. I just tweak my ebooks to how I want them, it saves (usually) having to change setting on numerous ebook readers.

Originally Posted by Faterson

Sigh. Again, m00min, you are apparently conflating "Publisher's Settings" with "Marvin's formatting". As explained several times already, you never need to readjust your theme colours and fonts. You set them once, and they automatically carry over from book to book, with 100% fidelity. You, apparently, keep switching between "Publisher's Settings" and "Marvin's formatting", and then complain things don't work for you. Just stop going to those Publisher's Settings, and everything will work fine for you in Marvin. The only thing you will potentially need to readjust, will be paragraph spacing, and Kris gave a perfectly valid reason earlier in this thread as to why paragraph spacing is not automatically carried over from book to book. You will also be reading books created by other people in your Marvin, won't you?

I'm not conflating anything. Read my posts again, I've been quite clear. Changing my theme knocks out all of my margin settings, changing back to publisher settings then disallows setting a theme.

Of course I read books by other people, I can't be the only person that runs a book through Calibre and swaps out the crap publisher formatting with their own. I've seen people mention doing this plenty of times on Mobile Reads.

Originally Posted by Faterson

Yup, that's what appears to be happening. What happens if you change your 0.75em value to, for example, 1.75em? Marvin should definitely reflect that, even in "Marvin's formatting".

I'm no CSS expert, just an amateur, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the default paragraph spacing in HTML is a half-line, or 6 points, which would be 1em. You now wish to further decrease that by 25%, so your preferred paragraph spacing appears to be 4.5 points. That's such tiny paragraph spacing, that "Marvin's formatting" may well decide it's so close to zero it might as well initially display it as zero, and I believe that's a legitimate, common-sense interpretation. After all, anyone can easily bump up the zero spacing to something else, if they dislike the zero paragraph spacing. (And I'm with you on that -- I hate it, too.)

There is a big difference between 0 and 0.75em; it's 3/4 of the total line-height of the text. Assuming a base apparent size of 16 pixels (this is what web browsers default to) and a line-height of 1.5em, 0.75em would be the equivalent of 18 pixels. In other words taller than the cap height.

I don't know where you would be using points in CSS.

[kguil]

Originally Posted by m00min

Just checked d I'm seeing that dot when the margins are collapsed to zero, which is definitely not in my stylesheet.

This is the style for my P tags:

p { text-indent: 1em; margin: 0 0 0.75em 0; line-height: 1.16666em; }

The text-indent is carried through to the "Marvin" settings but the margin is being detected as zero.

Is the book in the public domain, could I have a look at it?

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by m00min

I don't know why you insist on referring to me as a publisher, I'm not. I just tweak my ebooks

That makes you a publisher, sorry. Arguing about the semantics of "publisher" would be splitting hairs.

Originally Posted by m00min

I'm not conflating anything. Read my posts again, I've been quite clear. Changing my theme knocks out all of my margin settings

You've been anything but clear. See your statement just quoted above. Changing a theme in Marvin never knocks out anything, least of all margin settings. What you, improperly and confusingly, call "changing a theme", is constantly moving between "Publisher's Settings" and "Marvin's formatting", something that a regular Marvin user would be extremely unlikely to do. They would choose one of the two modes, and stick to it. However, "Publisher's Settings" in Marvin currently do not support any themes, font or color customisations. It's something you would need to request from Kris, so that they are supported even in "Publisher's Settings".

Originally Posted by m00min

There is a big difference between 0 and 0.75em; it's 3/4 of the total line-height of the text. Assuming a base apparent size of 16 pixels (this is what web browsers default to) and a line-height of 1.5em, 0.75em would be the equivalent of 18 pixels. In other words taller than the cap height.

I don't know where you would be using points in CSS.

Nowhere. But I have noticed that when you don't specify font and paragraph attributes in HTML in any way, the font that tends to come out in browsers appears to correspond to a 12-point font in a word processor, and the default paragraph spacing seems to correspond to one half of that, or 6 points. You can talk about "cap heights" and "base apparent sizes", but only 1 out of 100000 people would understand what you mean, whereas anyone can imagine a 12-point font in a word processor.

I think I know where the root of all of your struggles lies, m00min: you use reading devices from various platforms, and wish that your books would display pitch-perfect on every platform, even when they are so wildly different as iOS, Nook, and Sony. Good luck with that effort. I'd just give up instantly, choose the preferred platform for me from among the 3, and abandon the other 2, because it's just not worth the struggle. It actually is what I did: I gave away all my Kindle devices after Marvin was released, so that I could switch to reading e-books in Marvin "full-time", instead of struggling with idiosyncracies of the various conflicting platforms.

All of that said, m00min, if you do feel strongly about having to readjust paragraph spacing manually, visit GitHub and request Kris to add a switch among Marvin's advanced settings:

Always override publisher's paragraph spacing when launching new books? YES/NO

It would be an advanced setting that could potentially produce ugly results (as Kris explained), but then again: the damage would be "self-inflicted" by anyone who voluntarily selected YES in that switch. And if YES was selected, you would never again need to re-adjust paragraph spacing, either, when using "Marvin's formatting", which is what you wish to achieve, right?

My general advice is to forget about Marvin's "Publisher's Settings" switch because, as you can see, it can create lots of confusion. At this moment, I don't think that books as displayed by Marvin with the "Publisher's Settings" activated, are "fit for reading". There really is no way of customising that view -- and if you did customise it, would those truly be publisher's settings any longer? Again, you might request from Kris to make it possible, as an option among Marvin's advanced settings, to adjust font types and colours and Night Mode (but nothing else) even while viewing "Publisher's Settings" in Marvin... but then someone else might arrive, requesting even more customisable features to be enabled in alleged "Publisher's Settings"... and the difference between "Publisher's Settings" and "Marvin's formatting" would get blurred, and gradually all but disappear.

[m00min]

Originally Posted by kguil

Is the book in the public domain, could I have a look at it?

It's not actually any one book, it's the CSS that I tend to swap into any ebooks I buy. I can knock together a test book showing issue if that would be helpful. Though if I'm being overly picky about this stuff please feel free to tell me that, the other guy has. Repeatedly. :P

[m00min]

Ok, I've adjusted some of my CSS. When I use this:

margin: 0 0 0.75em 0;

the margin isn't being merged into Marvin's formatting.

But when I switch to this:

margin: 0.75em 0 0 0;

it does get displayed.

Does Marvin only take the margin-top value? If so I can switch my stylesheet around easily enough.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by m00min

Does Marvin only take the margin-top value?

I can confirm this bug based on my EPUB test file...

Take a look at the 2 screenshots below. They show the same page from the EPUB test file, as displayed by Marvin and Stanza. (Here is the original HTML file.)

Marvin's display is not just terribly bland compared to Stanza's, but Marvin only respects the top-margins of the headings as specified by CSS, while ignoring the headings' bottom-margins. It's a definite bug that should be fixed.

[m00min]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Marvin's display is not just terribly bland compared to Stanza's, but Marvin only respects the top-margins of the headings as specified by CSS, while ignoring the headings' bottom-margins.

Hehe, ok. Looks like I definitely need to swap over my margin settings then, which I don't mind doing as it's a really nice reader app. I just don't edit it very often as I've got something that works across Nooks, Kobos, Sonys, and *cough* iBooks */cough*.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by m00min

Looks like I definitely need to swap over my margin settings then

Hmmm... maybe Kris will fix this so quickly you won't have to swap anything. I did notice lots of things were not displaying optimally in that EPUB test file, the font colours being the main missing feature, but it never occurred to me it's the margin-bottom attribute, in particular, that gets ignored by Marvin, so thanks for pinpointing it.

(PS: When I say it's "my" EPUB test file I don't mean it's my code... It's a random dilapidated file I found somewhere years ago, full of fake bulleted lists and all, and this year I proceeded to cram every possible formatting feature into it, to see how Marvin would do with the file compared to Stanza, my previous preferred iOS e-reader. Stanza is still winning at this point, in terms of the display of this particular EPUB file, although it gets many things in it wrong, too.)

[m00min]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Hmmm... maybe Kris will fix this so quickly you won't have to swap anything. I did notice lots of things were not displaying optimally in that EPUB test file, the font colours being the main missing feature, but it never occurred to me it's the margin-bottom attribute, in particular, that gets ignored by Marvin, so thanks for pinpointing it.

(PS: When I say it's "my" EPUB test file I don't mean it's my code... It's a random dilapidated file I found somewhere years ago, full of fake bulleted lists and all, and this year I proceeded to cram every possible formatting feature into it, to see how Marvin would do with the file compared to Stanza, my previous preferred iOS e-reader. Stanza is still winning at this point, in terms of the display of this particular EPUB file, although it gets many things in it wrong, too.)

To be honest I've seen far worse support for CSS (debugging email newsletters is always "fun"). I've already switched it all around now so I have two versions. I've always written CSS to use the margin-bottom for spacing as it tends to keep things in line across columns a little better, this isn't something that's likely to be a problem in an ebook though.

I think I've got typical developers laziness, my attitude is: why press buttons and settings when I can write it once and never think about it again. It bit me in the ass this time.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by m00min

I've always written CSS to use the margin-bottom for spacing

With headings, though, margin-top tends to be used primarily (though not exclusively) because headings typically follow on ordinary text (ordinary paragraphs), and it would be bad practice to attach spacing as attribute of the final paragraph of ordinary text preceding the heading.

In any case, Marvin should properly support both margin-bottom and margin-top, even within "Marvin's formatting". Now that we're tracking this on GitHub (I've attached your finding to that particular issue and updated its title to refer to spacing besides colour attributes), it can be expected Kris will fix this sooner or later.

[kguil]

Originally Posted by m00min

It's not actually any one book, it's the CSS that I tend to swap into any ebooks I buy. I can knock together a test book showing issue if that would be helpful. Though if I'm being overly picky about this stuff please feel free to tell me that, the other guy has. Repeatedly. :P

If you can prepare a test book for me, I'd be grateful. Marvin should respect both the top and bottom margins.

[m00min]

I've just seen the iPad version has gone live. Updated and tested a book again and now the CSS margin-bottom seems to be working correctly. Seems you've inadvertently fixed it.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by m00min

Seems you've inadvertently fixed it.

There's nothing "inadvertent" about that -- like I've been saying, Kris has been actively improving rendering fidelity all along, in every successive Marvin version.

Absolutely: spacing is now also fixed in my EPUB test file. See the screenshot below, and compare it with the screenshot of the same passage I have posted just a few posts earlier, above.

This was likely fixed in the latest round of Beta-testing prior to Version 2 release. That's some miracle-speed bux fixing, eh? You report it, and before you know it, it's fixed!