TE
科技回声
首页24小时热榜最新最佳问答展示工作
GitHubTwitter
首页

科技回声

基于 Next.js 构建的科技新闻平台,提供全球科技新闻和讨论内容。

GitHubTwitter

首页

首页最新最佳问答展示工作

资源链接

HackerNews API原版 HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 科技回声. 版权所有。

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

223 点作者 OuterVale7 个月前

18 条评论

warpspin7 个月前
While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there&#x27;s also simply the deeper story here, that &quot;the web&#x27;s&quot; handling of paged media and the CSS paged media specs (to which his epub problem is related) is a never ending shitshow. Not only for epubs, for everybody who actually wants to print to real paper, too, ideally with a working cross browser solution.<p>Mistake is largely not in the specs, but in the lack of support for them. Page breaking controls, weirdly breaking tables, lack of access to area outside the page box to influence headers&#x2F;footers without weird hacks etc. etc. For printing, the 1990ies never ended.<p>This leads to the bizarre situation where basically everyone who has semi complex printing needs in web applications will create PDF and then print that - and for creating those PDFs, often HTML to PDF conversion is used, just with actually implemented CSS for paged media. Which again proves that the spec is at least 99% there, if somebody would just kindly implement it in a browser, too.<p>Won&#x27;t be more complex than having the latest WebGL whatever thing in your browser engine ;-)
评论 #42050859 未加载
评论 #42054534 未加载
评论 #42056539 未加载
zargon7 个月前
Another frustrating thing with ebooks is that you can&#x27;t get them in PDF format any more. So much time is spent making a nicely fomatted hardcopy edition, then the ebook is only available as a terribly auto-converted epub that throws away all the layout and style. Particularly cookbooks, as well as anything technical, I just can&#x27;t stand how lazy, ugly, and difficult to read the epubs are. All the tooling already exists to produce PDFs identical to the print version, but no, we can&#x27;t have those.
评论 #42049833 未加载
评论 #42050738 未加载
评论 #42050737 未加载
评论 #42049827 未加载
评论 #42088266 未加载
jll297 个月前
Not to mention the ugly&#x2F;unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust.<p>Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it&#x27;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.<p>This is a shame because e-ink is just becoming usable. Anyhow, long live the paper book!
评论 #42049336 未加载
评论 #42052104 未加载
评论 #42050769 未加载
评论 #42049202 未加载
benmanns7 个月前
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&#x27;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.<p>There really should be a better eBook specific authoring system. Ideally with importing from the print document, as that&#x27;s the canonical version. It&#x27;s just a website, after all, and we have great tools for building those.
评论 #42051667 未加载
benrutter7 个月前
Ebooks where such an exciting prospect when they came out, but whether it&#x27;s because of anti consumer monopolies, focus on DRM protection instead of features, or just plain old inertia, they haven&#x27;t really advanced at all passed their first ever implementation.<p>I sometimes read interactive fiction, and even a format as intentionally simple as Twine supports variables so content can be dynamic. There&#x27;s no reason ebooks <i>couldn&#x27;t</i> do things like that, but they are so far behind that they haven&#x27;t even caught up with where print publishing was 50 years ago yet.
gorgoiler7 个月前
In the page model, a heading says it needs only one line of vertical space, so if there’s a tiny bit of space at the bottom of the page it’ll get orphaned. (Vertical box space shown as <i>!</i> and <i>%</i> for the heading and paragraph, respectively.)<p><pre><code> Page 1 Page 2 .. Paragraph..% .. ..text. % .. .. .. .. !Heading </code></pre> When instead it should be moved to the top of the next page:<p><pre><code> Page 1 Page 2 .. Heading ! .. Paragraph.. % .. ..text. % .. .. .. </code></pre> Rather than being honest about needing one line…<p><pre><code> Heading ! Paragraph.. % ..text. % </code></pre> …the heading could instead claim it needs three lines, which would ensure it would never be orphaned:<p><pre><code> Heading ! ! ! Paragraph.. % ..text. % </code></pre> But now you have a big gap below the heading.<p>If you could then shift the paragraph up from where it should be in the flow such that the vertical space of the heading and paragraph overlapped…<p><pre><code> Heading ! Paragraph.. !% ..text. !% </code></pre> …then you’d get a heading that would never be orphaned on one line, but which looked as it if only used one line.
评论 #42048435 未加载
评论 #42048635 未加载
acabal7 个月前
If you think it&#x27;s bad that `break-*` isn&#x27;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!<p>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 shown little interest in improving it for over a decade now, while simultaneously fragmenting its own ecosystem with a variety of different proprietary formats that support different CSS and features.<p>ADE, while less common in new devices, is still very common in much older devices - B&amp;N&#x27;s eink Nooks were based on ADE at least as late as a few years ago. (Perhaps they still are?) ADE is closer to IE5 in terms of CSS support!<p>At Standard Ebooks we&#x27;re often hamstrung in our attempts to make beautiful ebooks by these big players refusing to improve their renderers. We&#x27;re forced to dumb down our CSS and use outdated techniques (like occasionally having to use tables for layout!) because ebook renderers are so bad.<p>iBooks is the top tier renderer, because as far as I can tell it&#x27;s basically a wrapper for an up-to-date Webkit; next is Kobo - also Webkit-based - along with other Webkit-based indie apps. The rest of the big players are far, far, far distant.
评论 #42049192 未加载
评论 #42048477 未加载
评论 #42048571 未加载
评论 #42049385 未加载
评论 #42048958 未加载
评论 #42049212 未加载
cratermoon7 个月前
Maybe the reason we&#x27;re still stuck with LaTeX and PDFs because ebook software can&#x27;t be bothered to implement decent typesetting.
评论 #42049524 未加载
评论 #42048702 未加载
WalterBright7 个月前
If I was designing an ebook reader, the display would look like a book&#x27;s display. None of the ereaders I know of do this.<p>1. Have a background image that looks like paper. No, a solid white or tan background doesn&#x27;t look like paper. Paper has imperfections in it, dirt, a grain, and you can faintly see the other side of the page. Except for the latter, this is easy to achieve. Simply scan a bunch of blank pages, and use the scan for backgrounds!<p>2. No, having a background with a fake coffee stain ring doesn&#x27;t work, because it&#x27;s the same on every page. You need a few dozen pages, each with a different stain.<p>3. A printed page is imperfect. The letters can be uneven and blotchy. No, don&#x27;t have a blotchy font. Have maybe 20 slightly different versions of the same font, and randomly select a glyph from one of them.<p>4. Books open to two pages. Not one. Two. The ereader should show two pages side by side, like a book.<p>5. Book fonts tend to look better than ereader fonts, though I cannot explain why.<p>But most of all, the sterile perfection of the ereader is like a drummer who is too perfect. Introduce error in it, it makes the music easier on the ears, and the books more pleasant to read.
评论 #42049586 未加载
评论 #42049250 未加载
评论 #42050025 未加载
评论 #42050892 未加载
fragmede7 个月前
Pragmatism wins out of waiting for css properties to get implemented, and div display inline block works today in epubs and doesn&#x27;t need to be backported to iBooks.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ebooks.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;7014&#x2F;how-can-i-prevent-a-widowed-orphaned-header" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ebooks.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;7014&#x2F;how-can-i-pr...</a>
评论 #42048574 未加载
评论 #42049567 未加载
vintagedave7 个月前
Another Safari CSS failure for typography is drop-cap support, which is where the first letter of a paragraph is drawn larger and in capitals. It&#x27;s a year since I looked at this, but the comments explaining the weird CSS say:<p>&gt; This was actually remarkably difficult to get right: the trick is setting line-height and height to &lt; 1em. If they were, eg, 7rem to match the font size then FireFox and Safari render very differently, with Safari showing a much taller gap in the text that the dropcap was centered in.<p>The same CSS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daveon.design&#x2F;manuscript-vintagedave.css" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daveon.design&#x2F;manuscript-vintagedave.css</a>) applies typographical sentence spacing to sentences within a paragraph, which you can see on any article, eg: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daveon.design&#x2F;what-are-you-optimising-for.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daveon.design&#x2F;what-are-you-optimising-for.html</a><p>I would love to see more CSS support for _typography_: not letter spacing, but actual typographical layout. The article is dead-on accurate when it says we still can&#x27;t reach what was normal in layout for six centuries.
NoMoreNicksLeft7 个月前
My personal gripe is &quot;non-linear&quot;. These are pages you shouldn&#x27;t be able to see just by flipping page-to-page... ideal for &quot;choose your own adventure&quot; type books.<p>Apple Books doesn&#x27;t treat these like pages that display only after you tap&#x2F;click a link though. They render them as a sort of popup above the regular page, styled differently and even with a different page width, as some sort of endnote-not-at-the-end functionality. If that non-linear page also has a link to tap&#x2F;click on, too bad. Nothing in the spec even slightly suggests their interpretation of it, and the longer they make it the norm, the more impossible it will become to implement the correct functionality because other book titles will have become dependent on it.
nephanth7 个月前
Interestingly, this related bug had very recent activity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=775617" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=775617</a>
lxgr7 个月前
&gt; I set myself some pretty stiff criteria for the ebook – it needed to replicate the design of print edition as far as possible [...]<p>My hot(?) take as a reader: I want none of this.<p>Just give me proper semantics and let my reader (while respecting my personal preferences) figure out presentation. I&#x27;m quite tired of publishers thinking that they somehow need to &quot;preserve the unique aesthetics&quot; of a paper-based medium, despite that usually working out quite poorly.<p>Fonts that look great on paper don&#x27;t necessarily on my eInk, LCD, or OLED display I&#x27;m reading the book on, for one thing. Margings&#x2F;padding are usually a world of pain, and one of the first things I end up doing when opening a new ePub is often to disable all publisher formatting.<p>While I love the idea of an open format and really don&#x27;t like the idea of being stuck in Amazon&#x27;s walled garden, at least they figured that part out in their Kindle ecosystem from the beginning. With ePub, it&#x27;s been hit and miss.
__mharrison__7 个月前
When I published my first book, I had to learn all about ebook best practices and ended up writing a book about the state of the art in 2012.<p>Sad to see how little we&#x27;ve moved on in twelve years.<p>On a semi-related note, Typst had similar issues but the devs are actively working on fixing issues like this.
atoav7 个月前
As someone who learned layouting from a grumpy old typographer who still had experience in cutting letters by hand I have to say epub layouts are often quite horrible — especially when figures and tables are involved.
userbinator7 个月前
The fact that it&#x27;s a book about typography may mean the requirements are a little different, because I personally (and likely many others) don&#x27;t really pay attention to such things.
评论 #42048575 未加载
评论 #42050329 未加载
elric7 个月前
I wouldn&#x27;t be embarrassed about that particular ebook, it&#x27;s probably the best looking one out there. The other 99% of ebooks however are atrocious.<p>I get that this isn&#x27;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&#x27;ll suck.<p>My Kobo is pretty good for reading sci-fi tomes. Fantasy isn&#x27;t as fun, as they often come with maps and the maps always render poorly.