RE: [pagination] Draft pagination document now in GitHub and online

>- There is a typographical usage (frequent in the US I think, and part of Soleb house style) where paragraphs at the top of a page have a first line *not* indented. There are good reasons for this: indentation is useless because you just had a page turn, and even harmful becase when a page starts with an indent, the eye goes first to the second line and then moves up. This should be included in CSS.

--I strongly disagree about omitting an indent on a paragraph at the top of a page. That can mistakenly signal to a reader that it is NOT a new paragraph. That is typically done only when that paragraph follows a spacebreak (see next item).

>- About the space break issue, I think this can be solved if the space break is not implemented as an extra blank line, but as a top-margin on the paragraph style. This way the space will never happen at the bottom of the page.

--Semantically, a space break signals a _non-hierarchical_ break in the narrative. It is not a <p>, but it is also not a type of <p> (e.g., a <p> with extra space above). It functions as a type of subheading without content. And in fact in many usages, when a space break occurs at the top or bottom of a page, a symbol (often an asterisk or bullet or three spaced asterisks or bullets or something like that) is rendered, even though that rendering is not done when the space break occurs mid-page. Likewise, a blank-line space break is often equivalent to an ornamented space break: that is, the three asterisks or whatever are rendered at all such spacebreaks, whether they occur at a page break or not.

I agree with the other comments--good discussion!

--Bill Kasdorf

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Aubourg [mailto:eric.aubourg@soleb.com] 
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2013 5:59 AM
To: public-digipub-ig-comment@w3.org
Subject: Re: [pagination] Draft pagination document now in GitHub and online

Dave,

This is really great work, and summarizes very well the main issues!

Some comments after a first reading:

- There is a typographical usage (frequent in the US I think, and part of Soleb house style) where paragraphs at the top of a page have a first line *not* indented. There are good reasons for this: indentation is useless because you just had a page turn, and even harmful becase when a page starts with an indent, the eye goes first to the second line and then moves up. This should be included in CSS.

- About the space break issue, I think this can be solved if the space break is not implemented as an extra blank line, but as a top-margin on the paragraph style. This way the space will never happen at the bottom of the page.

- The orphan-widow issue is a good example of trade-off and the usefulness of a possible "severity" feature. Our house-style about orphans and widows is something like "prefer 3, 2 is acceptable, 1 is forbidden". You nicely pointed out tradeoffs are necessary, and this implies, I think, the possibility to give different weights, or severities, to the various constraints.

- More generally, one might want to have different styles for the first page of a chapter (no header, a different footer, etc.)

- Your example of how lines to be put in sync again after a head calls for a baseline grid feature. This is the only clean solution to keep lines registered in a spread, or in multi-columns styles.

- About the footnotes, ePub 3 and html 5 seem to suggest to have them in aside tags. But iBooks for instance does not respect all style requests : it is impossible to use small caps... Apart from this platform limitation this is certainly the right way to implement footnotes. There should be ways to have them pop-up on relevant platforms, and be in specific flows on other platforms. Note that footnotes can also be placed between columns, this is very efficient, similar to marginal notes.

Best,
Eric

Received on Sunday, 27 October 2013 16:18:51 UTC