Quote:
Originally Posted by donnieparker
I would imagine there's some hand-tweaking involved, though, since ebooks can't replicate everything perfectly from print editions.
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This is not true at all. It's trivially easy to build an EPUB with 100% compliance to the standard and make the end result look as close to a printed book as possible. The only real differences are that you can exactly control page breaks in a physical book, know the exact size of the page, and have guaranteed space for headers/footers that can display info useless to an eBook (name of the book, etc.). If the reader has a screen size that exactly matches the printed book page size, it's almost like reading a PDF of the original physical book.
So, modern CSS will allow the design of the book to very closely match the printed book. The problems are:
- Most readers don't support 100% of CSS.
- When a user changes the base reading font or font size, it can radically change the look.
- On a book for sale, embedded fonts to make the look correct can cost a lot of money.