Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Use indented paragraphs instead of blank lines between paragraphs #55

Open
n-zer opened this issue Dec 28, 2024 · 2 comments
Open

Use indented paragraphs instead of blank lines between paragraphs #55

n-zer opened this issue Dec 28, 2024 · 2 comments

Comments

@n-zer
Copy link

n-zer commented Dec 28, 2024

This is just a suggestion, but the formatting of the original web novel is not ideal for an e-reader as there is a lot of wasted space. Print publications and e-books typically have no spacing in between paragraphs and instead delineate paragraphs with indents like so:

image

This greatly improves readability, especially in dialogue-heavy sections, and can be done fairly trivially by adding a stylesheet:

@charset "utf-8";
/* Styles for Worm */
p{
  text-indent:2em;
  margin-bottom:0px;
  margin-top:0px;
}

Traditionally the first paragraph in a chapter is not indented, but I haven't bothered with this for the few web novels I've reformatted since it requires per-chapter processing and I'm lazy. But for your project it may be worth doing as well.

@domenic
Copy link
Owner

domenic commented Dec 28, 2024

This is a good suggestion.

I'm a little hesitant to deviate too much from the original presentation. And I'm a bit disappointed that this kind of typesetting is required on a per-book basis (instead of done automatically by the e-reader's default stylesheet). But we should probably do it. Maybe with an option to turn it off.

Skimming through my Kindle library, I see most are formatted in the way you suggest, with one instance where paragraphs were separated by a small additional margin on top of the line-spacing. (Maybe 0.2em or so.)

I'll work on this when I work on #54, which is another instance of departing from the original presentation to become more book-like.

@domenic domenic changed the title Formatting fixes Use indented paragraphs instead of blank lines between paragraphs Dec 28, 2024
domenic added a commit that referenced this issue Jan 2, 2025
This introduces arc title pages, and a hierarchical table of contents which nests the chapters under the arcs, powered by the new chapter-data/ files.

The chapter titles are configurable, using the new --chapter-titles option explained in the README.

Closes #54.

As a side-effect, this introduces a style sheet included by all chapters and arc title pages. This will help with #55.
@domenic
Copy link
Owner

domenic commented Jan 3, 2025

I gave this a quick try. It's not trivial. Your simple version works poorly with the already-indented sections. (The indents today use padding-left: 30px.) For example, Worm Scarab 25.2 looks pretty bad with your proposed stylesheet:

Spoilers, obviously

image

Note also how this uncovers a bad use (in the source) of <br> instead of a paragraph break... We can fix that up via the substitutions system, but I worry about how many more there might be.

I tried something a bit more sophisticated, of

p:not([style]) {
  margin: 0;
}

p:not([style]) + p:not([style]) {
  text-indent: 1em;
}

and it's OK:

Basically the same spoilers

image

Even that worked very poorly in Ward Daybreak 1.8 until I added more missing indents.

I'm a bit hesitant to pull the trigger though, without more testing. Hmm.

domenic added a commit that referenced this issue Jan 3, 2025
These are all around indentation and paragraph breaks, and were spotted during work on #55.
domenic added a commit that referenced this issue Jan 3, 2025
These are all around indentation and paragraph breaks, and were spotted during work on #55.
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants