As for CSS styling, Stanza appears to ignore it completely.

If my assumptions are correct, I consider it rather misleading to say that Stanza “supports” HTML e-books.

By extension it is misleading to say that Stanza supports ePub.

It seems strange that

using Webkit on Mac and IE on Windows to do the rendering

the result is inability to render even simple css. I agree with Todd Jonz that it seems that HTML is not rendered in Stanza, but rather “processed” to extract content from it.

If using IE or Webkit were the case then there were no need for such extraction of content.

So, it is completely unclear how Stanza uses IE and Webkit and what are Stanza’s real possibilities for handling HTML.

> > Stanza is actually using Webkit on Mac
> > and IE on Windows to do the rendering
>
> If it is then Stanza’s rendering of HTML
> and CSS should be much better.

The reason your example doesn’t render as you expect isn’t due to a problem with the rendering engine, but rather as a result of how Stanza handles HTML files.

As far as I can tell, Stanza doesn’t actually render the HTML in a source file, but rather uses it as input to a pre-processor that attempts to extract content from it in an “intelligent” manner. For example, it appears to assume that the content of the first header element it encounters contains the title, which may or may not be the case. I have a number of my own editions of plays in which the title appears in a “div” element that is styled using CSS and the text “Dramatis Personae” appears in the first header element. When viewed in Stanza, all of my plays are entitled “Dramatis Personae.”

As for CSS styling, Stanza appears to ignore it completely. The reason that I bother to generate my own editions, which are all adapted from Project Gutenberg texts that are already available in HTML editions, is so that I have complete control over the appearance of these editions using CSS. This makes Stanza essentially useless for viewing these editions since all of the formatting that I have added with tender loving care is discarded.

If my assumptions are correct, I consider it rather misleading to say that Stanza “supports” HTML e-books. It seems to me it would be more accurate to say that Stanza can extract content from HTML files and render it, possibly inaccurately.

I’d be very interested to hear from Marc on this matter.

(Aside for those keeping score: My third attempt to share files between my Mac and my iPod using three different releases of Stanza was no more successful than the first two. Although the iPod client now succeeds in finding the Mac server, establishing a connection, and determining what books are available for sharing, it times out while attempting to transfer a book.)

Stanza is actually using Webkit on Mac and IE on Windows to do the rendering using platform-specific native components.

If it is then Stanza’s rendering of HTML and CSS should be much better. Currently Stanza does not succeed even in rendering such simple HTML + CSS as

div.header {
color: green;
margin-top: 2em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
border-bottom: 1px solid red;
text-align: center;
}

<div class=’header’>
<h3>1. Lassiter</h3>
</div>

Instead of rendering all HTML and CSS Stanza renders only text.

With such poor performance in rendering HTML and CSS I do not see any perspectives for Stanza making revolution in reading.

The choice of Java as a platform for ebook reader seemsIt seems strange for me. Why not Mozilla’s XulRunner? Why not Adobe’s AIR?

Stanza is actually using Webkit on Mac and IE on Windows to do the rendering using platform-specific native components.

ePub is HTML based. HTML is quite complicated. That means that successful rendering of ePub can be achieved only in case reader is based on some quality browser engine.

Stanza is Java based. As I know embedding quality browser into Java program is a serious problem and the only browser control available for Java that can be evaluated as being of high quality is WebRender. But producers of that control even have not published licensing terms.

What engine for rendering HTML is used in Stanza? Is there any hope for rendering HTML using some quality browser engine, being it Firefox or Webkit or yet some other?

I have great hopes for Stanza, reading ebooks was a major consideration in my iPhone purchase. I have posted elsewhere on TeleRead that I prefer no hyphenation on a small screen (perhaps an option to turn it off), and that italic/bold support is essential for many of the books I would like to convert to read with Stanza. Those are my personal priorities to watch out for. I believe these are in the queue, but it is early days for everyone on the iPhone and I am patient!

It would be nice on the settings page to have a preview of the font size when adjusting the slider so that you don’t have to pop back and forth to the book to get it just so!

As for the page turning problem, we have had other reports as well. I find it very annoying, and we are trying our best to track it down and correct it. Note, though, that this only affects swiping to turn the pages; tapping the sides to switch pages always works, at least for us.

Anyone else have a problem where Stanza stops turning pages after about a half hour of reading?

(roughly. I’ll have to time it and count the pages…)

After I wrote it, I did discover that it will open a book to the latest read page, and since then an update has come out that auto-opens the latest book.

I still have an issue with Stanza’s support for the epub table of contents.

It does indeed have a table of contents, but it seems to pull the TOC from the .opf file, instead of the TOC.ncx like it should. Still, this is a minor problem.

Overall I love Stanza, and thanks for the new features that are coming soon!

(I’ll update my review sometime today.)