Use publisher settings for paragraph spacing & paragraph indent

[chfleur]

Would you consider a switch to selectively disable paragraph spacing and paragraph indent without also losing custom fonts and line-spacing?

Hyphen's formatting options are great, but the settings for paragraph spacing and paragraph indent can be overly aggressive.

Publishers often use paragraph spacing (margin-top) to mark section/scene breaks within a chapter. Having this overridden by Hyphen can be problematic as sections/scenes may run into each other with no visual cue when a section/scene changes.

Publishers generally use no paragraph indent for the first line of a chapter and section break. Having Hyphen add an indent here doesn't affect reading comprehension, but having Hyphen respect the publisher's setting would be nicer aesthetically.

Right now the only way to keep publisher settings for paragraph spacing and paragraph indent is to "disable colors and formatting," but then custom fonts and line-spacing are also lost.

Thank you.

[matt-curtis]

A few others have brought up this issue before. I do plan on making styling toggleable individually, but there's no ETA for that.

[chfleur]

Great! Thank you!

[gennaios]

A note about this concerning the upcoming version. I believe I might have said such before in email. I think by default, messing with certain CSS attributes such as p/div margin and indent, as do several EPUB apps, may not be a good idea. There is a reason certain apps such as those by larger companies change only page margin and line-height. Imagine all that can be done in CSS by combining various attributes of p, div, span, etc. – (negative) margins, padding, and floats –, to get format various things like numbered poetry, or text with other than 0 top/bottom margin such as a new section or citations that are not necessary within a div or blockquote, and perhaps there are many other situations I can't think of at the moment, much is lost or mis-formatted when changing paragraph or div margins and indents. There are a wide range of books other than simple as we call novels that have nothing but all paragraphs formatted the same.

I lean towards not having such options at all. After so many years of iOS, I still am not a fan of any 3rd party iOS reader. Marvin was interesting for a time. Sure Books could have more features, but at least what it does at its core as they say, it does fairly well. As with other past or current apps or devices such as Kindle, Kobo, Marvin, and so forth, to have a well-regarded and app performing well enough to make of worth continued development, effort may be better placed at features such as library management, reading experience, navigation, dictionary lookup, annotations, etc. What is the best possible digital reading experience and what that may look like someday, perhaps there is much to be done.

As for what features might someday be praised, perhaps consider LiquidText or Marginnote. Reading EPUBs can be much more than simple novels, as all sorts of academic and scholarly texts from just about all such publishers have been available for sometime.

[matt-curtis]

Thanks for the detailed feedback, @gennaios. Some of what you've mentioned is actually a big part of the direction I'm trying out (at least for the beta) of Hyphen: simplifying the formatting model down entirely down to a few key options (like font size), and instead providing smart defaults. This may or may not be a popular decision, but at least the response will help me find out!

[gennaios]

Terrific.

Note the calibre reader too doesn't change any other defaults except I believe page margin, font & font size. Line-height too may be sensible, though I sort of prefer a particular line-height, the one used by iOS Books is fine, and other options like 1x, 2x, etc. may not be needed though an option may be fine though indeed I think that slightly clutters the interface. For that in particular, I am of the thought that there is something optimal and design may be best attempting to figure that out and present one default as do some other apps. But an option isn't so bad. Others like mentioned above, I think are not a great idea.

btw, one option of calibre is custom CSS. That might not be such a bad idea.

As mentioned, making the app distinguished and of value through other features I think is of the most worth. Another that I'm not sure how many other apps attempt is perhaps GoodReads integration, e.g., if the metadata dc:identifier is an ISBN, link or show info from the site, and perhaps offer other integration such as mark as read, currently reading, etc. Though such may not be reliable enough to make worth adding as not all commercial EPUBs include such.

OverDrive has an API and it maybe possible to browse, borrow, and read DRM ePUBs though the reading of DRMed books may if possible complicate the app and if possible, be of consideration later.

If there is a public or even private beta, would happy to join.