Quote:
Originally Posted by Tanzaku
Admittedly, I am new to the entire eBook thing, but I love the concept! I do not, however, love the aesthetics. But, I am a publisher, and perhaps my eye use just trained too well for the current state of the art.
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Although I haven't had formal training/experience with book production, I have had many of the same problems you have with ebooks automatically reformatted from reflowable formats.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tanzaku
There are certain typesetting and layout aesthetic conventions in publishing that are routinely missing from the eBooks I have seen. For example . . . - Widows (a single line or word at the top of a page)
- Straight quotes (rather than curled quotes)
- Straight apostrophes
- Simple words at the end of line (e.g., "I", "a", etc.)
- Words too widely spaced to fit justification
- Slanted fonts rather than true italics
. . . just to name a few of the most obvious. |
I'd like to add a minor point about widows and orphans. I've found that PDF rendering on the Reader unfortunately
is less legible than BBeB rendering at the same font size -- text in PDF files appears significantly lighter than text in BBeB files. To overcome this, in the PDF files I've generated for the Reader I've used primarily 11pt fonts. I use very tight margins and a short header, but that still only leaves room for a 22-line text block. With such a short text block, widows and orphans are a frequent occurrence, and eliminating them by creating artificially shorter pages results in so many shorter pages as to create a visually "ragged" look. So I've found just leaving the widows and orphans as-is to be the lesser of two evils.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tanzaku
Here is a draft I'm working on that addresses these issues. I'm using InDesign CS3 to create the layout design using Gutenberg text and then outputting as a PDF.
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I've been doing something similar with LaTeX. I've been lazy about cleaning up my class file and auto-formatting scripts, so they aren't ready for prime time, but here's an example of the kind of output I'm getting:
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.
Benefit here is all open source tools :-). (Well, except for the font... I've been using Adobe Caslon for that, but that's easily enough changed.)