Bulleted lists in ebook/epub

[rstroud]

I have sent a PDF file to support@atlantiswordprocessor.com to illustrate a problem in ebook creation that involves bulleted lists.

The essential problem is that some necessary codes for accurate formatting are being omitted. Justification and line spacing above are lost.

I will not try to describe the problem further in this post. The PDF file illustrates everything, and I have shown how adding a couple of codes corrects the problem.

Roland

[admin]

It is correct: Atlantis Word Processor puts no paragraph formatting for automatic bulleted lists to EPUBs.

I might comment on this more in a later post.

[rstroud]

Oh, well ... In any case, it is easy to add the codes with either Sigil or Tweak.

I will be busy for the next few days, but maybe this weekend I can post some simple directions for how to insert the codes.

People who are even slightly familiar with the guts of ebook formation do not need directions. But people who do not qualify as minimal nerds will need help. It is quick and easy.

[rstroud]

Okay, I will try to show the exact nature of the problem and how to work around it. If I can just get the graphics to work here, we will be in business.

Consider the following text (from an early draft of an ebook novel by a friend of mine). The bulleted items are fully justified. This is a screen shot from within Atlantis:



Now, here is the epub text that Atlantis generates. The justification and the spacing between bulleted paragraphs are lost. Sigil is the viewer, but the result was the same for the Calibre viewer also. In Sigil:



Below is a shot of the CSS file within Sigil, which shows that the codes for justification and "margin-top" are missing. (I will follow this with a shot of the same CSS code after I tweaked it.)



The relevant paragraph style, above, is in line 2 — the paragraph style *li1*. It makes no reference to justification and margin-top.

Now, here is my tweaked version of the CSS code, within Sigil, where I added code for justification and margin-top:



And here is the result in Sigil:



Sigil is free. You can download it here:
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/downloads/list

and learn more about it here:
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/

If you prefer to use Tweak, you can accomplish the same steps with it that I outlined above.

[Joel]

I'm a newbie Atlantis user whose sole objective for the app is publishing e-books. Now, after a year has passed since the last post on this issue, I find that the present edition of Atlantis still ignores list-spacing styles when creating e-books (now including mobi as well as ePub). Any chance that this will be addressed soon in an update?

This is a big problem for me, as my book is rather technical and is loaded with bulleted and numbered lists. Editing the CSS (at which I'd be a complete noob) to correct this problem may be a nightmare.

Is creating an Atlantis routine(s) to put in the presently-missing CSS code a nightmare as well?

[Robert]

Hi Joel,
No doubt that Admin has his own good reasons for withholding this feature, but I understand your frustration.

There is a workaround though.
1. Create your automatic lists as usual in Atlantis, with appropriate paragraph spacing and/or alignment.
2. Right-click each automatic list, and choose “… List > Convert to Manual List” from the menu.
3. Save the document as EPUB. The paragraph spacing or alignment properties of the lists in the source document will be saved to EPUB.

HTH.
Cheers,
Robert

[Joel]

Thanks much for your workaround suggestion, Robert. I've tested changing lists to manual formatting before conversion to epub and found that this action indeed resulted in the desired spacing between list items in the epub.

Unfortunately, however, I also found that the workaround (using Atlantis 1.6.6.1) produced an unacceptable artifact: loss of indents in the first lines of the list items, simulated as follows (the "....." dots below would in reality be absent from the document; they represent the leading spaces that this forum unfortunately throws away):

• First item, first line of paragraph
.....First item, second line of paragraph
.....First item, third line of paragraph

• Second item, first line of paragraph
.....Second item, second line of paragraph
.....Second item, third line of paragraph

Am I implementing your workaround incorrectly, or I must take yet another action to end up with properly formatted lists in epub?

[Robert]

I have created demo files. Please see attached files.

“Hanging Indents in Lists (Automatic).docx” includes a basic automatic bulleted list with hanging indentation. I assumed that hanging indentation was what you wanted to achieve in your EPUB file.

“Hanging Indents in Lists (Automatic).epub” is the EPUB file that Atlantis generated from “Hanging Indents in Lists (Automatic).docx”. Among other paragraph properties, the original indentation was lost in the conversion.

I then reopened “Hanging Indents in Lists (Automatic).docx” in Atlantis, and converted the automatic list to manual. I got “Hanging Indents in Lists (Manual).docx”, which converted to “Hanging Indents in Lists (Manual).epub”. This latter file displays as intended with its hanging indentations in ADE.

Of course, you can adjust the value of the indentation to suit your own requirements.

So again, all you have to do is to create automatic lists with all the required paragraph properties. Then turn them into manual lists. And save to EPUB.

HTH.
Cheers,
Robert

[Joel]

Hi, Robert.
Thanks again for your kind response.

Strangely, your Atlantis docs didn't register with hanging indents on my copy of Atlantis --- the first lines looked like there was only a space between the bullet and the first line. Also, your epubs came over as zip files with HTML and CSS, not as files with *.epub extensions. I could not open them (and unfortunately I don't have the sophistication to read CSS files).

In any case, know that I have been using hanging indents all along. I've created list styles incorporating them, the style in the example case being 'Bulleted 1'. The first attached file, JoelList_BeforeManualization.docx, shows this formatting. (See post thereafter containing this file---Atlantis only allows 5 attachments). The second attached file is the epub created from this file (same name). Interestingly, there is little indent to speak of, basically a single space (never noticed that before), but at least succeeding lines in the paragraph line up with the first line.

The third attached file, JoelList_AfterManualization.docx, shows the first file after list manualization, and the fourth attached file shows the resulting epub (same name). Note that the bullets look larger JoelList_AfterManualization.epub (I had specified a larger bullet in the style), the bullet-to-first-line-text spacing here is not much different than the bullet-to-first-line-text spacing in JoelList_BeforeManualization.epub. However, the lists are indeed separated, and the second and succeeding lines are indented as specified.

The fifth attached file, JoelList_AfterManualization+1stLineIndentToSpaces.epub shows the same list after manually replacing the first-line indents with spaces. The sixth attached file, the same-named epub, shows the list properly indented (though spaces aren't precisely the same as inch-specified indents) and properly line-spaced. (The converted mobi file is not perfectly aligned -- the bullet-to-first-line-text spacing is missing a space --- but livable.) This makes it a really a hokey workaround, but doable. Much easier, for me at least, than messing with the CSS for each bulleted/numbered item. Reliable? Hopefully.

I really wish Admin would address this issue in his automatic conversion engine.

[Joel]

Here is the "First file", Robert, as mentioned in the previous post.

[Robert]

Hi Joel,
I just downloaded my own demo files.
“Hanging Indents in Lists (Manual).docx” displayed as intended and as expected in Atlantis 1.6.6.1, and “Hanging Indents in Lists (Manual).epub” displayed as intended and as expected in ADE.

First, EPUB files must be opened in appropriate eReaders like Adobe Digital Editions, Sony Reader for PC, Nook for PC, or CoolReader, to name only a few. There is no reason why the EPUB files that I posted should ever come over as ZIP files in any proper eReader.

Now from your latest post, it seems that we have been talking at cross-purposes. You say that you “have been using hanging indents all along”. But “hanging indents” are also called “negative indents” and they are traditionally designed with one main characteristic. Here are two definitions of what a hanging indent is:
Hanging indent:

Alternatively referred to as a negative indent, a hanging indent is an indent that indents all text except the first line.

Hanging Indent:

A hanging indent is the strange format of a bibliography note that is required in most writing styles. The first line of each note is flush to the left, but the subsequent lines of the individual notes are indented.

From your document “JoelList_BeforeManualization.docx”, I gather that you don’t really want to create list paragraphs with hanging indents. You want ordinary bulleted lists with flush-left alignment of text, and rather wide spacing between the bullets and the list items. You also seem to want some degree of paragraph spacing before and after. If you save “JoelList_BeforeManualization.docx” to EPUB, you lose all of these specifics.
Note that “JoelList_BeforeManualization.docx” uses an outline list, which is overkill for what is intrinsically a simple bulleted list. Outline lists are more complex to create and to manage. If you don’t actually need them, stay away from them.

This said, I have tried to save bulleted lists with flush-left alignment of text to EPUB. I haven’t managed this feat (yet). These things can easily be created in Atlantis, but saving such formatting to EPUB seem currently impossible. I think we would need to be able to indent/outdent the body text and the bullets independently. This is not currently available in Atlantis.

I’ll post a new message if I can come up with a solution. But I doubt it. As you know, EPUB coding uses HTML and CSS. And, as said at Align Lists Flush Left,

It’s surprisingly difficult to left align lists. Most, if not all browsers indent them by default.

You also might want to take a look at CSS Design: Taming Lists

So I think that the Atlantis developers will have to look into the way Atlantis saves lists to EPUB, irrespective of whether they are automatic or manual lists.

Cheers,
Robert

[Joel]

Robert, thanks for spending yet more time to write on this issue.

FYI, see attached FIGURE 1. The listed files shown are exactly as I downloaded them from the forum. (I downloaded the epubs freshly today after apparently having deleted the previously downloaded zipped versions.) The zip files correspond to your two epub files. FIGURE 2 shows the unzipped form of one of them. Did the epub files that I subsequently sent likewise arrive to you as zipped archives? If so, is something happening at the forum site to epub files? If so, perhaps Atlantis needs to check into this phenomenon. If not, maybe something at my end --- though my PC routinely stores my epubs correctly and opens them nicely in Adobe Digital Editions.

FIGURE 3 shows the result of adding my additional indent-to-spaces step to your April 29 suggested workaround. (FIGURE 5 shows the corresponding mobi file in Kindle For PC -- not as nice, but usable.) Suitable for my purposes --- so long as it works dependably. (I've not yet applied this two-step workaround to numbered lists and to lower-level lists with larger indents, but it should work for them in principle. Perhaps I'll comment again for other readers after I've tried the approach on different types of lists.) Your manualization suggestion was key to this endeavor. Thanks again for posting it.

NOTE: Before my previous post, I had briefly tried working with a manualized SIMPLE (vs. outline-style) list. Didn't seem to behave any differently.

Concerning hanging indents, I start my docs in MS Word 2010 before converting them to e-books in Atlantis; potentially minimizes the learning curve; have used Word for years. FIGURE 4 shows the paragraph settings I've used in Word for Bulleted 1, the style used to create the demo files. (See in the figure under 'Indentation'.) Perhaps the term 'hanging indent' is used in more than one way. FIGURE 4 illustrates how I'm using the term. Not obvious in FIGURE 4 is that I've ALSO applied bulleting to the style using 'Numbering' and used Word's 'Adjust List Indents' dialog to justify the bullet to the left margin. Word indents first-level bullets by default, which is undesirable for my requirements.

From what I've casually seen, Atlantis imports Word files relatively faithfully. If you've found otherwise, I'd be interested to know the areas in which importation is errant.

[Robert]

Joel,
EPUB files are technically ZIP compressed archives. If you change the “.epub” extension to a “.zip” extension, the ZIP file can be opened as a ZIP archive. However, if you try to open such a “.zip” (EPUB) archive in ADE, ADE won’t be able to make sense of the input. The file must have its native “.epub” extension to be identified as a valid EPUB file.

I don’t understand what’s happening with the EPUB files that you download from this forum. The “.epub” files that I download always end up as “.epub” files on my system. There must be some interference between the forum and your hard drive. Maybe your antivirus is checking the EPUB files that you download. To do so it might change the extension from “.epub” to “.zip”, and leave it at that?

Converting automatic lists to manual is OK if it only involves a one-click command. Having to add spaces in appropriate number manually is too much of a hassle. And probably, rather unpredictable. Note that in software like InDesign, the indenting can be set through tab, space or “em” value. “em” values are most likely more dependable.

You are right. It seems that the term 'hanging indent' is used in more than one way. Technically-speaking, your lists have text with flush-left alignment. So nothing is really “hanging” as far as the textual part is concerned. But the bullet itself is literally “hanging”. This is probably why some people call such paragraphs “hanging indents” too. But traditionally, “hanging indent” applies to paragraphs whose first line of text hangs over the other lines of text.

As you say, Atlantis imports Word files relatively faithfully. But Word codes files in a very complex and rather plethoric way. If you mix that with the more simple code used by Atlantis, the results might be unpredictable at times.

Now let’s go back to the subject of indentation. As can be seen in your screen capture, the text of your whole list is displaying with left alignment. But the corresponding paragraph is designed with “hanging indentation” in Word, and “first-line outdent” in Atlantis. If you look carefully at the Preview in the Word dialog, you’ll notice that the text is actually previewed as a traditional “hanging indent”, with the first line of text hanging over the rest of the lines! In spite of this, your whole text is aligned to the left. It is because the bullet itself is outdented with same value as the first line is indented. So what is actually hanging is the bullet.

When Atlantis converts such paragraphs to EPUB, it obviously keeps the “hanging indentation” set for the first line. This is why we end up with text that is displaying as a traditional “hanging indent” in the eReaders. The bullet itself is not outdented. But, as said at Align Lists Flush Left, “it’s surprisingly difficult to left align lists” in HTML. The solution found by Jeremy Church on that site involves an elaborate trick. He suggests adding “bullets and numbers in a pseudo element displayed as a table-cell”.

Let’s hope that the Atlantis developers will look into this and come up with a viable alternative for us ordinary mortals…

Cheers,
Robert