Quote:
Originally Posted by mikelv
Hi Mikel,
thanks for your feature request!
I've already seen that the Project Gutenberg ePubs don't look that nice. The reason is, that the author of the ePub-file didn't format the content pages in a way they look nice  .
In my opinion it's not a good idea, if EPUBReader starts to modify the look of the content pages. Where do you start, where do you stop? This is the job of the author. |
I do think there is a place for some customization for the user. While I agree the eBook has some formatting the question is who is in control. I remember with the browswers first came out (yes, I am considerably older than that) and the idea was that the user controlled the presentation while the source controlled the content. Today this has been largely changed to the source controlling both the content and the presentation and sometimes there are good reasons for this but not always. Some sites even force the width of the window for no apparent reason other than they can control.
Certainly the PG files do not have authors creating them. User customization can go a long way to aid the reading experience. CSS has the word cascading in it to allow overriding settings in certain instances and a CSS approach can allow for user customization. Already there is an ability to change the font size. Changing margins, text indenting for paragraphs, default justification, screen display width, hyphenation preference, default fonts are all candidates for user preferences but there are limits as to what should be changed as it affects the original authors presentation. For example some users force bold font which can lose the authors emphasis capability unless it can be accommodated in some fashion, like switching to italics.)
This is certainly a philosophy discussion but could be interpreted as a user rights issue.
Dale