Punctuation Moved to Beginning of Line?

Question

I am working, not to say struggling, with an EPUB3 book exported from InDesign 2023.

The dedication page looks like this in Sigil:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops">
<head>
    <title>Dedication</title>
    <link href="css/idGeneratedStyles_0.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
    <link href="css/idGeneratedStyles_1.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
</head>
<body id="dedication">
   <p class="FRONT-MATTER_Dedication">To the hundreds of<br/>Southern Polytechnic State University <br/>
students who helped me refine<br/>my approach to this material,<br/>thank you! </p>
</body>
</html>

When I upload to Google Play Books and look at it with the Web book viewer, it looks like this:

The punctuation on the last two lines has been moved to the beginning of the line!

It looks right in Sigil, in the Google Play Books viewer for Android, and in Calibre, but I'm reluctant to just say "aberration" and forget about it. A little time with Google finds one similar case that appears to be confusion of dir="rtl". To test, I added dir="ltr" to the <p> element, and that fixed it. My question is why would I need to do that?

For the record, the CSS for FRONT-MATTER_Dedication looks like this:

p.FRONT-MATTER_Dedication {
  -epub-hyphens: none;
  color: #000000;
  font-family: "Minion Pro", serif;
  font-size: 1.333em;
  font-style: italic;
  font-variant: normal;
  font-weight: normal;
  line-height: 1.5;
  margin-bottom: 9px;
  margin-left: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  margin-top: 126px;
  orphans: 1;
  page-break-after: auto;
  page-break-before: auto;
  text-align: center;
  text-decoration: none;
  text-indent: 0;
  text-transform: none;
  widows: 2;
}

It was generated by InDesign, so there's some useless stuff in there, but I can see nothing harmful.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 11 '23 at 00:55

1

Look in the epub OPF file (open it in Calibre, Sigil, or a text editor) to see if any foreign language code is added that uses a RTL setting. For you the correct setting should be 'en-us' or 'en' (if that is your country where epub is published and read [LTR]). You might find that when it exported from InDesign that it mistakenly included other languages such as:

<dc:language>en-us</dc:language>
<dc:language>de-DE</dc:language>
<dc:language>ar-SE</dc:language>

Read the following. Adobe1 and Adobe2

answered Sep 11 '23 at 00:55

granite

306
4

That was it. Thanks. Do you know why InDesign would generate <dc:language>ar-SA</dc:language> in the generated EPUB? There is no Arabic anywhere in the InDesign document. – Bob Brown Sep 11 '23 at 13:54
1

Possibly a human coded programming bug. Then later today ... I tested exporting my InDesign book to Epub format and it did NOT have any additional languages in the Epub OPF file (my default ID book language is preset to EN-US). So...per this web link it suggests setting the default language in InDesign in the 'Character Panel'; this may resolve keeping your exported Epub in your default language (without adding additional languages).
https://www.accessiblepublishing.ca/working-with-indesign/#primary-lang
– granite Sep 11 '23 at 23:23
Thanks! I'll set the language. – Bob Brown Sep 12 '23 at 12:33

Punctuation Moved to Beginning of Line?

1 Answers1