well, ok, for the .mobi i created yesterday, i've looked at it in a couple different ways. 1. it looks good in my mac desktop kindle app. 2. it looks good in my iphone kindle app. 3. it looks good in my ipad kindle app. 4. it looks good in my mac desktop kindle previewer. 5. last but not least, it looks good on my kindle. i tried to look at it in amazon's cloud reader
http://read.amazon.com but i can't see how to import "personal documents".
the only thing i disliked enough to _change_ was the limp paragraph indentation on the iphone app. i'd try to increase that, but only if it wouldn't make the indentation _too_big_ in all the other viewers... oh yeah, i'd also give a little more breathing room to the chapter-navigation links above the headers, because sometimes finger-presses on them instead activated the "next page" area of the right-margin, or the "toggle bookmark" area at the upper-right... and headers too could stand a bit more whitespace. but i consider it to have attained success now, and will go on to .epub. unless someone has criticism? speak now. or later i will just say "sorry, too late". *** also, just so it's clear, it's no surprise that this book should render quite nicely on all of these platforms. after all, this is a very simple book, consisting of the basics -- paragraphs, in chapters, with frontmatter. if your system can't handle a book that's this simple, you're in trouble. because this thing is a "baby" book. so i am sure that the p.g. mobi for this book displays fine too. (ok, except maybe with spacey paragraphs.) what _is_ significant here, though, is that we got a consistent, acceptable appearance on all platforms with virtually _no_styling_ at all... (and the little bit that we did use was auto-applied by the converter.) this is a very important takeaway. now take a long look at the .css that marcello uses... it's a mess of gobbledygook, a steaming pile of shit. and it's a mirror which reflects the fact that there is a corresponding pile of complex tag-markup as well, creating a dense, complicated mess that's difficult to even get your head around, let alone come to master. that's the wrong way to do it. it's over-complicated. it's smarter to start simple, and build up minimally, with constant vigilance against tolerating any bloat. *** moreover, what we most typically hear, from e-book "designers", are complaint after complaint about how they tried to do something, but the viewer-app didn't give them the result that they had been led to expect. and hey, i can agree that if you specify a right-indent of 3ems on a blockquote, that's what you should get. but it doesn't do any good to _cry_ if you don't get it... you need to accept the reality of what actually happens. and work within those constraints. that's the way it is... and, given the situation that you're _not_ gonna get the right-indent on a blockquote that you asked for, then perhaps a "solution" is _to_stop_asking_for_it_. to stop banging your head against the cement wall is _not_ to "give up", but rather to do the sensible thing. it's also important to keep in mind that even when we decide to stop asking the kindle for a right-indent on our blockquotes, it doesn't mean that we have to stop asking for a right-indent on our other output-formats. if the .epub viewer-programs support it, that's great! when we convert to .epub, we'll specify a right-indent. finally... i _reject_ the contention that we have to "dumb down" the books in order to put 'em on the mobile platforms. as the current example shows, we can get _nice_output_ -- the kind we would hope for, and specify ourselves -- from almost all these machines, even the smallest ones. yes, we _might_ have to give up a few things, such as the right-indent on blockquotes when converting to a .mobi. but i don't believe that qualifies as "a dumbing-down"... it's a minor quibble, one we can hope will be fixed soon, but certainly not one that should cause us great despair. so i'd encourage you to wipe that "dumbing-down" idea from your brain-space. we do _not_ have to accept that. and it is most assuredly _not_true_ that using a _simple_ system is the equivalent of "dumbing-down" our approach. indeed, i'd say that over-complicating things to the point where the whole thing falls apart is really the _dumb_ path. -bowerbird