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A friend recommended Moon+ Reader for android and I was initially impressed by all the features and controls.

Then I checked how my own published books render in Moon+. I saw lots of weird things. If it matters, I'm on Android 4.21 for one device and Android 4.1 on my Nook HD+ tablet.

For example, I formatted a play epub which involved lots of hanging indents and centered paragraphs and verse, none of which seemed to render correctly. This play rendered correctly on ibooks, kindle, ADE and nook, but it seems that Moon+ Reader seems to disable css completely.

In options --> Miscellaneous, I toggled Disable CSS styles and checked "SHow "Preview with Publisher Formatting" button.

But it seems to make no difference. I see almost no publisher css except for bolds and italics.

I'm guessing that Moon + just doesn't support a lot of CSS and that "Preview with Publisher Formatting" just doesn't work. If that's the case, so be it, but I find it hard to believe. Also, I would appreciate any online references to CSS support for each ebook software. Maybe moon+ doesn't have a lot of mindshare, but I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one to notice these deficiencies.

This thread http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=194146&page=11 seems to confirm that Moon+ Reader disables publisher defaults by design, but the setting to change that doesn't appear to do anything as well.

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    You are not alone :( I understand that supporting CSS is a heavy job, but indentation and quoted bits are really necessary
    – mau ♦
    Aug 8, 2015 at 19:44

2 Answers 2

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This site provides pretty good case-by-case metrics for CSS support by device / reader http://epubtest.org/results/

You are absolutely correct about your assumption that the Moon+ reader is overlaying it's own generic CSS over the publisher provided CSS. This has been a battleground in the ebook world for a while now but we are starting to get more support for the publisher side CSS because fundamentally you can't have 'one CSS to rule them all (ebooks)' Sure, at first it looks flashy and nice like you mention above but once you start importing a variety of books with different formatting needs you begin to see the limitations of this generic CSS almost immediately.

Also appending !important to your CSS properties and attibutes can sometimes work as a last ditch effort to overriding the device / application CSS - check out how to implement it here:http://css-tricks.com/when-using-important-is-the-right-choice/

Hope this helps :)

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  • Thanks for this great link. by the way, I actually do customize my css by the major devices -- although I try to keep things as general as possible. I haven't really focused on the software side although I guess I need to now... especially since android devices don't have a single dominant ebook reader.
    – idiotprogrammer
    Oct 6, 2014 at 21:07
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There is now a setting in MoonReader to disable publisher's CSS. But even when it's not checked, not all CSS is supported.

I've tested multiple Android Epub readers with a bilingual epub I made, where the two languages are distinguished by the background colour and the font style (the second language is in italics). Only the Gitden Epub reader displays the background color and the font style properly.

According to my tests, these Android epub readers support font styles (bold and italics) but not background color:

  • Prestigio
  • Moon Reader
  • Pocketbook
  • Mantano
  • UB Reader

FB Reader did not even show italics.

I applied the CSS by selecting the class, using !important.

Update:

It seems that the Gitden Reader does not exist anymore.

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