That tells the ereader to look for the file Styles. Two things to keep in mind: First, the later class will take precedence, so if I added a class attribute with the values red and blue, the text would display as blue, since the blue class came last. I usually try to stick to one class per element for that reason. That allows you to customize the spacing between elements quite a lot.
Photo: Pixabay. Hi Joel! I find css is essential to eBook preparation, even though I now use InDesign to track and build the final book.
By modeling all my style sheets on CSS rules it makes it easier to debug any problems with the books before I finalize file for upload. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Home About Articles Contact Shop. The Rule of Law All CSS really comes down to is a series of rules that define how a particular element or kind of element will look when an ereader displays it. Text-break: This is a class — the name of a particular style.
You can tell because of the period at the beginning. Since there can be more than one rule per declaration, each declaration needs to end in a semicolon: h1,. So how can you make your CSS styles more powerful and easier to edit? Ah, yes, well talking about eBooks is a different matter entirely. Viewed 6k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Here are some other things to think about: Most publishers use the epub file as input to generate a kindle file, so there are usually conditional Kindle adjustments to make.
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Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Making Agile work for data science. Stack Gives Back Featured on Meta. New post summary designs on greatest hits now, everywhere else eventually. Linked 1. Others will use the default serif font. It takes one of the following values: left , right , center , justify. The only thing you might need to know about these is that justification in ereaders, while serviceable and getting better , can sometimes get strange, especially when the screen or window is small.
This is why much computer text is aligned to the left margin only, even though full justification is the standard in print. Play around and see which alignment you prefer. But wait! To manage this, you use a negative value:. However, to keep that first line from pushing off the left side of the screen, you need to add a positive padding-left value at least as large as the text-indent :.
This is the last bit of control that we apply to the shape of the paragraph: line-spacing. In CSS, the distance between the current line and the previous is always expressed in ems — but, for some reason, without adding the unit. So a typical body paragraph might have this line-height :. Sometimes you need to fiddle with its behavior — how it displays. Remember back in the HTML post I talked about how tags tend to set off either block containers which always start a new line or inline containers which always start immediately following the previous content?
Well, guess what: you can use CSS to change even that. And more. Adding the property display: block; will make an element act exactly like a paragraph. On the other hand, display: inline will make a paragraph stream into its immediate predecessor.
Now we get esoteric. If we add display: inline-block , the outside of the container will be treated as a block — like a paragraph — while the contents will be treated as inline content.
Essentially the element will behave like a cell in a table. And of course, when you add display:none; the element disappears.
Why would that be useful? Well, I have used this rule in conjunction with media queries to help me target the formatting for a particular style of Kindle.
Since old MOBI7 Kindles only allow very basic CSS just what was in use at the dawn of the millennium , I have to do some ugly things to get margins and hanging indents to work correctly. This has been a very quick and dirty introduction to the kinds of CSS that you are likely to find useful in ebook creation. But it should give you enough to work with. Download White Robes and open it up. Look through the CSS. You should be able to figure out what just about every rule in the stylesheet does.
Try playing around with some of the settings. See what works. My two favorite sites are. I accept that, but for the beginners this series is aimed at, I think it makes for a helpful breakdown. Forgive me. That link leads to a wonderful post by the wonderful Liz Castro, author of the wonderful ePub Straight to the Point. If you use identical left and right margins, your element will be centered.
Just saying. The problem with this is that Adobe Digital Editions, which is the basis for a number of commercial ereaders, breaks if you use media queries. So I avoid them when I can. It leads to some weirdness. So I usually set the width and tell the ereader to make the height proportional: auto.
Make sense? Then you start over. Computers love counting in hexidecimal, for some reason. As always, your mileage may vary depending upon a particular ereader. Photo: pixabay. Amazon links contain my affiliate code.
David, Getting started late. Can you post a link to all 12 of your e-book articles, or give me a list of titles so I can search for them? Tom, thanks.
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