Hints for formatting text conversations

[Maggie Sims]

Hi,

As text 'bubbles' are becoming more prevalent in ebooks these days, I want to see if there is a way to do this in Jutoh please.

I've started playing with tables, but all guidance / assistance is appreciated. I'm not a developer so mostly relying on the UI and the help files.

Thanks,

Maggie

[Julian Smart]

Hi Maggie,

I'll send you a Jutoh file in a separate message with a possible solution - not ideal, but the best I could come up with after a similar conversation with a user. It's not straightforward unfortunately. Hopefully other users here have suggestions.

Regards,

Julian

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[Meredith Bond]

Could you just put in text boxes and align them left and right?

[Julian Smart]

Hi Meredith,

Sort of, yes, but there are some wrinkles. I'll append my notes below to give an indication.

Regards,

Julian

Speech Bubble Notes

It’s quite hard to do speech bubbles in Epub/Kindle and so any solution will be a compromise. This is my best effort so far using a text box for each bubble. I recommend you put the Styles tab into All styles mode to work with the new paragraph and box styles together.

There may well be better ways to do it that I haven’t thought of, perhaps with more custom CSS.

New styles

Box styles: Speech Bubble Left, Speech Bubble Right. Apply these by selecting the text (or existing box) and double-clicking on the box style.

Paragraph styles: Speech Bubble Left Outer Paragraph, Speech Bubble Right Outer Paragraph should be applied to the paragraph containing the text box. Speech Bubble Inner Paragraph should be applied to the paragraph within the text box.

Note that there is custom CSS in the style sheet to set the left margin for the right-aligned text box, which you can edit via Project Properties/Styles, third icon. This is necessary because Kindle (at least) doesn’t obey right-alignment for the paragraph containing the text box. But setting the left margin pushes the box to the right. Right-alignment is still enabled for the paragraph style ‘Speech Bubble Outer Paragraph Right’ so it looks correct in Jutoh.

If you want to change aspects of the boxes such as colour, padding around the text, and so on, edit the box styles, not the individual boxes. Changes will be applied automatically.

Other aspects

Colour: here, colour is applied to borders only because colouring the background may cause problems when the user applies non-standard themes. But you could experiment with giving foreground and background colour to the text boxes – you may need to specify both to avoid text becoming illegible should only one of these change. Also, unless the background is a high contrast with the text colour, Kindle may choose its own colour to use for text, defeating your own settings.

Width: this is the biggest problem. It’s not possible to reproduce the situation where the bubble is the correct width for a small message, but it is still right-aligned; Kindle in particular ignores right-alignment for a text box, so the alignment has to be fixed with a percentage box margin. So I have chosen a 50% text box width. You could use a different size, but you should also then change the CSS specifying the left margin width for Speech Bubble Right, which you need to do by editing the custom CSS in the style sheet properties as Jutoh doesn’t allow percentage margin values.

A workaround might be to have, say, three different sizes of box for large, medium and small messages, and use those as appropriate.

Spacing: for some reason Kindle isn’t honouring the outer text paragraph bottom margin so adjust the bottom margin in the text box styles to change spacing.

Font: I have added an embedded font. Currently message text is marked as Calibri in Jutoh (via the inner paragraph style) but mapped to the DejaVu Sans embedded font. You can find a font that is better for text messages.

Hyphenation: unfortunately it doesn’t seem possible to turn hyphenation off for individual paragraph styles in Kindle, or (AFAIK) the whole book, so that’s not ideal. It’s possible that some Epub readers will respond to the ‘hyphen: none’ CSS so you could add this to the custom CSS for the inner paragraph style (via the style sheet custom CSS), but it made no difference on Kindle when I tried it.

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