Question on Font and Color, or lack thereof for you HTML formatters

362 Views 5 Replies 3 Participants Last post by Klip, Feb 6, 2013

Rick Gualtieri

Discussion Starter · Feb 6, 2013

I haven't had any issues with my ebooks with regards to fonts, colors, or background (at least that I know of). In Word I usually leave everything default and that seems to work out fine once I save as filtered HTML, then format for mobi and epub.

For my latest ebook, though, I'm playing around with ways to shrink the file size a bit. Even with the defaults, Word will still litter the HTML file with Font: whatever, Color: whatever, Background: (you get the drift) CSS snippets. To me this seems like an obvious way to shave a few kilobytes off the file size, (getting rid of all mention of font, colors, and backgrounds). When programming a typical webpage, this will just cause everything to render in the default (usually white Background and Times font or whatever the user has set).

My question is, will this work the same way once it's formatted for Mobi/Epub? I'm assuming such as ebooks are little more than formatted HTML, but figured I'd ask for any of those who are pure HTML ebook writers.

In other words, if I remove all this stuff will the book render on a Kindle or Nook fine, with those devices' settings overriding the HTML?

(and yes, I do plan on testing this before I upload

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Klip

· #2 · Feb 6, 2013

Yes.

By chance, I was just reading the KDP official formatting guide this morning (you know, for a little light reading!) and they actually say that you should not specify colour, size, or font, alignment or anything else for body copy. Indent and paragraph spacing is about all you should specify. You should leave the rest out so that the device can set the body copy at whatever the device's "default" setting is.

So not only is it a way to shave off KBs, but it results in better formatting for your book.

Be aware that if you use conversion software like Calibre, it may add some of that stuff back in, even if it is not present in the original HTML. Not sure if it does in the latest version, but it might. What I do is convert to EPUB and then check in Sigil (free epub editor) to make sure all that stuff is fine. Then convert the epub to mobi using KindleGen (or you can just upload it direct to KDP)

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Rick Gualtieri

Discussion Starter · #3 · Feb 6, 2013

Thanks, Masha!

Awesome on the Sigil. Have been using it too to clean up Calibre's epub oddness.

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Klip

· #4 · Feb 6, 2013

Rick Gualtieri said:
Thanks, Masha!

Awesome on the Sigil. Have been using it too to clean up Calibre's epub oddness.

Exactly. Such a useful little program.

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Mathew Reuther

· #5 · Feb 6, 2013

This is why I have my own home-made markup done in sigil, and I use that for all my needs.

Raw text goes it, I mark it up, ebook comes out the other side looking good and slender.

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Klip

· #6 · Feb 6, 2013

These says, I export to epub from Scrivener, then edit that with Sigil. The latest version of Scrivener for Windows has a pretty good compiler. The one they've just released is SO much better than the earlier versions.

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