Workaround for nested ordered lists in EPUB?

Question

I am slowly converting a book I laid out in InDesign into an EPUB that echoes the logic (not rigidly the visual presentation) of the print version.
Most of it has gone smoothly, because I test and fix at different stages, and have tagged the hell out of everything from the beginning. I view the test files on an original iPad, a Nook Color, and an iPhone. I have the Kindle Previewer.app and Kindle.app that I use when converting to .MOBI.
However, there are two problems I’m having when viewing the book on a Nook Color that I do not know how to fix.
The first problem is vertical line spacing when there are character styles (span classes) applied to specific words in a line of text. This book has many book title references and some foreign words that are italicized, for example, and wherever they occur, there is additional line space above and below that line of text. This also occurs where characters have been tagged as bold (either using <strong>, <b>, or <span class=bold>—I have tried all three ways of tagging these instances of text. You can see what a page looks like on the Nook Color at http://www.girsbergerdesign.com/Nooktest/nooktest.html.
The other problem I’m having is with nested ordered lists. There are some outline-style lists, with levels 1. and a. While I can edit these in Sigil to maintain the type=1 and type=a of these lists, on the Nook Color, they are still showing up as 1., with the a. level indented properly but numbered 1. You can see a sample below (top) and a sample of the same page on the iPad in iBooks (bottom):
Within iBooks on the iPad and the iPhone, the correct outlining system is maintained, after I change the value of the type of the lists to "1" and "a". So I know that works. I just don't see why it wouldn't work on the Nook Color.
In the Kindle previewer.app, the bolds and italics and other span class formatting behaves properly (i.e, does not cause unsightly linespacing), but it too ignores the a level of the outline-style format, although it honors the indent.
Does anyone have any advice about this? I'd like to be able to map the list styles to HTML for structure, but this is driving me crazy!
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Thanks for your response, seddybell. This got me thinking, and I believe I have found a solution to the linespacing situation (still working on the outline situation).
I think the line-height attribute is the issue. Because so many textbooks in print start out with something like 10/12 spacing (the book I’m converting is 11/14 Kepler Std), the line-height in the CSS file (or the leading of the paragraph style in InDesign, before exporting) has to be increased to roughly 164% of the font-size (in this case, from 1.27 to 2 em in the CSS file) to ensure that the <em> and <strong> characters don't throw off the linespacing for viewing on the Nook. This way, whether the user has “Publisher Defaults” turned on or off, the linespacing won’t be affected.
I noticed that when I turned on “Publisher Defaults”, my text looked fine, but when I turned it off, THAT was when the spacing problems slapped me in the face!
Here was what I did with my basic p.TX tag, and then made proportional adjustments to other tags:
Original CSS style exported from InDesign:
p.TX {
font-family : "Georgia", serif;
font-weight : normal;
font-style : normal;
font-size : 0.92em;
text-decoration : none;
font-variant : normal;
line-height : 1.27;
text-align : justify;
color : #000000;
text-indent : 18px;
margin : 0px;
Line-height value increased:
p.TX {
font-family : "Georgia", serif;
font-weight : normal;
font-style : normal;
font-size : 0.92em;
text-decoration : none;
font-variant : normal;
line-height : 2;
text-align : justify;
color : #000000;
text-indent : 18px;
margin : 0px;
I do something similar to your p.space-above on the InDesign side. I always add styles with a space above or below attribute that ports over as a margin quite nicely, so I'm glad I've already developed this good habit! But I'll definitely be adding more space between lines now to accommodate this oddity on the Nook (assuming that's what it is).