A new (to me) wrinkle on iBooks for iPad: at first sight, this e-reader refuses to let you override body text alignment without applying dummy <span> tags. But while working on the ePub edition of Ransom Seaborn, I found that Ransom’s journal entries – which I’d left-aligned to differentiate them from body text – worked just as I wished without any extra effort. Some experimenting led me to the theory that iBooks is happy to honor text alignment in style A, as long as you’ve established body-text style B. This would make sense, since the user’s settings would then be respected for body-text proper, while allowing the book designer to apply text alignment to other paragraph elements.
You can see this from the following two screen shots, which are based on exactly the same test CSS and XHTML, the only difference being that the first paragraph has been copied and re-pasted in the second shot. The ‘voting power’ of that extra paragraph seems to persuade iBooks that this is the body text style, and that the left-alignment requested for the final paragraph can therefore be honored. I think this is good news, not least because it saves me a significant amount of tagging work on Ransom Seaborn 
