Thanks for the suggestions and the feedback, everyone -- particularly ath. Since you've brought up so many salient points I figured it would be worth replying in detail, even if it's academic since neither of us seems to actually own an iLiad yet
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Originally Posted by ath
You're probably doing this the wrong way round, I think. It's not (or should not be) a question of cramming as much onto the page as it can hold -- it's a question of balancing a typeface, and a line length against surrounding space. Margin space will almost certainly help improving readability -- but I won't be able to say until I actually have an iLiad in front of my eyes.
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My thought about margins is the same as yours -- for the printed page. However, in my experience, large margins are un-necessary and problematic on the smaller screens of digital devices. Whether this holds true for the iLiad or not is something I'm interested to learn. My intent, with the small margins of the test PDFs, was to display as much text as possible, using some display area
and the physical sides of the device to perform the same role as wider margins on a paper edition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ath
Empty lines are used instead of paragraph indentation: this gives the page a very patchy look, which detracts from reading. Longer paragraphs do fairly well, but dialogue looks awful. I'm almost sure that closing up the empty lines, doing proper indentation *and* increasing margins would actually save pages in the end. (On a low-resolution device, such as the average PC screen, the empty lines may help a bit, but the iLiad is at least medium res, if not hi res.)
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I agree, but at this point at least, the software I'm using for HTML->PDF conversion has limited functionality in that area. I hope the iLiad will be high resolution enough to handle paragraphs like a printed page -- anyone with an actual device care to comment?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ath
You really should use proper quotes, and dashes. They help a lot in understanding what's in the quote and what's not: inch signs " don't give any help at all.
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Yeah, hit the nail on the head, there. I have no way to pre-process 14,000+ texts in any respectable way. My concern here is to get "close enough" so that the texts are readable. However, I'd say that " marks
do provide a pretty good idea of what is or isn't in a quotation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ath
Less problematical, but still ugly is the page heading: avoid boldface -- it attracts attention, and there's no reason for that in a page heading. Personally, I would leave the header out, and have chapter structure as bookmarks, and also leave pagination to the PDF reader.
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Good point - bold wasn't working. However, I'm not sure what capacity the iLiad has for saving your place in a document (or even displaying the current document title while you're reading). Page headings and pagination: how are they handled within the reader, folks? Does it help at all to have the page numbers/Chapters headings/Document titles in the page header?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ath
As you probably figured out by now, I care very much about typography: I think most PDF eBooks available today are unacceptably ugly, but that they could, with a little work and care, be made much better-looking. That may make me go in the entirely opoosite way than most others.
On the other hand ... I'm lucky if I can do one of these texts in about 12-15 hours.
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Well, 12-15 hours per text is more than "a little work and care" in my book. The examples you've got on your site look like very professional print products, and I'm sure they'd be readable on an iLiad as well -- but why not refine the rules to suit the iLiad, rather than simply mirroring print design rules?