The index in my /Power Shift/ ebook does not use dl, dt, and dd in the
epub xhtml. I gave up on them and rewrote autoidx.xsl to output div
elements instead, with CSS to supply the indents. In a nutshell:
<dl> became <div class="dl">
<dt> became <div class="dt">
<dd> became <div class="dd">
That's it. Since the divs are already nested by the indexing templates,
it turns out that the only CSS I needed was:
div.dd {
margin-left: 2em;
}
I had intended to fold this back into the next release, so thanks for
reminding me about this.
By the way, if you liked /Power Shift/, you should check out my new book
/Solar Dividends/ which describes how to use solar energy to eliminate
poverty in the world.
Bob Stayton
[email protected]
On 3/19/2020 9:16 PM, Robert Nagle wrote:
This is very interesting to me. I have tried for two projects to
generate indexes that would work on Kindle. The indexterm content had
both a primary and secondary level. Everything would look good in
epubs on epub reading systems(and be valid, etc), but in mobipocket it
would render inconsistently the elements in the index -- sometimes
indenting, sometimes putting them on the same line. It was a mess.
Even though it rendered fine in Kindle Previewer on all simulated
devices, the dl, dt, dd just scrambled everything on Kindle app for
android as well as on e-ink Paperwhites.
I spent a lot of time trying to troubleshoot (and the details were
fuzzy), but concluded that the problem lay not with docbook but with
kindlegen (or maybe the css support on kindle reading systems). It's
frustrating because having a good multilevel index is standard on many
nonfiction ebooks.
On the other hand, when looking at Bob's POWER SHIFT ebook (which came
out a few years ago), the index rendered fine on Kindle. - although in
that ebook, it used page numbers for an ebook.
(In my projects, I used <xsl:param name="index.prefer.titleabbrev"
select="1"></xsl:param> and <xsl:param name="index.links.to.section"
select="0"></xsl:param> )
(I could provide an ebook example if you need)
BTW, never got around to saying it, but Bob I enjoyed Power Shift ebook
Robert Nagle
From: Richard Hamilton <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
To: Lars Vogel <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Cc: Jason Zech <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>,
DocBook Apps <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Bcc:
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 18:42:50 -0700
Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Converting Docbook epub to Kindle shows
warnings
Hi Lars,
I know this is from a long time ago, but I just ran into the same
problem with a file that nests variable lists using the
list-presentation=“blocks” processing instruction.
In that case, the XHTML5 (this is with 1.79.2, building an epub3) is
valid, but kindlegen doesn’t like the nesting. It closes off the
highest level <dl> and <dd> elements and flags some <dt> elements as
being invalid.
The result doesn’t lose any content, but it removes the nesting and
flattens everything to one level.
As with your case, the epub is valid and when displayed, the nesting
is fine.
At this point, I’m convinced that the problem is in kindlegen. I just
used the Kindle previewer, which wasn’t available in 2012, and it
created a .mobi file that preserves the nesting (at least on the
devices I tried in the previewer).
Anyway, this is probably way to late to help, but I figured I’d add it
to the thread in case someone runs into it in the future, since it is
still a problem using kindlegen.
Best regards,
Dick Hamilton
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Robert Nagle
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