Stylus Margin Ergonomics: Formatting EPUBs for Note-Taking Tablets

Taking Notes on Large E-Ink Tablets is a Challenge

For academic textbooks, technical documentation and long-form literature, the way people read and annotate it has changed with the advent of large-format digital paper tablets, including reMarkable 2, reMarkable Paper Pro, Kindle Scribe, and Onyx Boox Note Air.

When setting custom remarkable 2 epub margins or optimizing kindle scribe stylus margin notes, standard ebooks meant for traditional 6" e-readers feel tight on 10.3" displays. The 5% symmetrical margins encourage handwritten marks to be placed towards the glass borders, which can cause palm rejection problems and poor hand posture.

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The 14% Asymmetric Gutter Technique

If you are reading a textbook or a manual and want to make active handwritten notes in the margins, formatting your EPUB with the asymmetrical margin layout provides a margin space as well as a dedicated column to make notes.

You can use targeted ereader margin padding css to define a 14% writing margin on your dominant hand side and still keep your reading column neatly aligned by injecting targeted CSS into the EPUB stylesheet:

@page {
  margin-top: 6%;
  margin-bottom: 6%;
  margin-left: 6%;
  margin-right: 14%; / Dedicated handwriting gutter /
}

body {
  font-size: 1.05em;
  line-height: 1.8;
  text-align: justify;
  hyphens: auto;
  max-width: 82%;
}

p {
  margin-bottom: 0.8em;
  text-indent: 0;
}

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Benefits of Custom Ergonomic Margin Formatting