Ugly formatting

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I downloaded this PDF and put it on my 505. What I found was that the size of the text is too small. Can this be made larger so it looks good on a 6" eink screen?

That's one of the problems with PDF, of course - the fact that it can't generally re-flow and be zoomed. By using it, one is losing one of the main benefits of an eBook reader - the ability to read the book in whatever font and size one wishes. For me, that's a more important benefit that the "problem" of such things as widows and orphans which, speaking personally, bother me not one jot.

[tompe]

Om the Gen3 it seems that it will accept non-justification if the word spacing becomes to bad. And that I think was a good design decision since one line that does not line up onto the right margin is not so disturbin as a line with to much space between words.

The hypenation algorithm used in LaTeX/TeX shoud be possible to implement on these kind of devices and it does not need large databases.

[kovidgoyal]

For spacing between words, the problem is that SONY's reader software attempts to do full justification even when the line is too short. It's just badly designed.

[JSWolf]

One problem I have seen that is so EASY to fix is word—word where the first word would fit on the line above, but because of the em dash it won't fit. if I am reading a book that I've converted and find the em dashes make too much of a mess, I sometimes go back and convert the em dash to an en dash like this word – word. When reading I can easily read it like it would have been had it been the first example with an em dash.

dash -
em dash —
en dash –

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

Yes, right-o. We are still working on the template and the GREP replacements -- hence I refer to this sample as a "draft."

My mother language has lots of one letter and two-letter elements (like a, or, ...) and it is considered a very unapropriate to leave those "hanging" at the end of the line. Even children are taught that. The problem is avoided when you replace all combinations of: Space A_letter Space with Space A_letter Non_breaking_space
My language version of Microsoft word does that automatically.
I am very surprised that InDesign does not have tool for automatically dealing with this.

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

We'll try the non-serif font. Not my favorite choice, but you might be right for basic text.

Try it. I am looking forward to seeing results.
Citation from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif_font
----- quote -----
While in print serifed fonts are considered more readable, sans-serif is considered more legible on computer screens.[citation needed] For this reason the majority of web pages employ sans-serif type. Hinting information, anti-aliased and sub-pixel rendering technologies have partially mitigated the legibility problem of serif fonts, but the basic constraint of coarse screen resolution—typically 100 pixels per inch or less—continues to limit their readability on screen.
---- end of quote ----

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

Question: As to paragraph spacing, would you rather see a first-line indent without a space between paragraphs (as it is now), or a flush-left and 1-line space between paragraphs? We could also turn off the base line rules and do a 110% space between paragraphs as you suggest. Preferences?

My *personal* preference is to have a little first line intent (three spaces) plus 110% or 120% space between paragraphs. Definitely not a full empty line between paragraphs. Screen real estate is too valuable for that.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by tompe

Om the Gen3 it seems that it will accept non-justification if the word spacing becomes to bad. And that I think was a good design decision since one line that does not line up onto the right margin is not so disturbin as a line with to much space between words.

The hypenation algorithm used in LaTeX/TeX shoud be possible to implement on these kind of devices and it does not need large databases.

The hyphenation feature of FBReader actually use the LaTeX/TeX algorithm.

[Tanzaku]

Originally Posted by kacir

I am very surprised that InDesign does not have tool for automatically dealing with this.

Yes, you are right, it does. In fact, that's the exact pattern for GREP or basic TEXT replacements. The draft document we posted has already had the single word "I[space]" replaced with "I[nonbreaking space]" to illustrate the point. We simply haven't yet run the rest of the bad-boy offenders through their paces yet.

As to the serif versus non-serif issue, again you are right. The common wisdom is to use non-serif fonts for screen displays and serif fonts for the text of printed displays. So, which category does the eBook fall into? Printed or screen? Or somewhere in between -- in which case, it is debatable which camp this technology falls into. We do, indeed, live in interesting times.

BTW, I see that Hadrien has responded with a post in this thread. I am most impressed with Feedbooks approach to this problem and their results are very good for the current state of the art. I have no doubt that as time goes on their algorithms will get better and better. At least I hope so! I love their approach to customizing the PDF creation with personalized fonts, margins, and headers/footers. Very user friendly. I can see a time when they will have customizable leading, hyphenation, paragraph styles, etc that will easily approach the kind of professional layout possible with InDesign -- but customizable on the fly. They are actually not that far from it now and clearly demonstrate a keen knowledge of the PDF architecture. So, if you are not familiar with their site, may I give them a plug?

[JSWolf]

Tanzaku are you going to ignore the problem that your PDF is unusable because the font size is too small?

[Jadon]

A plus having a set font size or two like the eBookwise is that it can produce texts without widows or orphans, and my conversion CSS file does that. I'm of the ragged-right school, since adding soft hyphens to allow smooth justification is too much work for my personal conversions. I do have Tidy make straight quotemarks and apostrophes curly. I've never before read of any "no one-letter words at the end of lines" rule, and three random paperbacks I just looked at don't seem to have, either. But the hard-space method could let me cater to it if desired, just as more extensive work to soft-hyphenate long words could let me get smooth justification even at the large font size I use. So in theory an eBookwise could follow every rule cited.

[Tanzaku]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Tanzaku are you going to ignore the problem that your PDF is unusable because the font size is too small?

No, we're still fussing with the template and will have some more samples with the various suggestions from this thread. What font size are you comfortable with? The draft PDF was as 9-point font for the basic text.

BTW, another option we are looking at is using a font with a larger x-height. (The x-height is essentially the size of the lower half of the letter -- for example the full height of the letter "e" but only the part of the letter "t" below the cross.) Fonts with a larger x-height are easier to read at the same font size. Examples: New Century Schoolbook is an example of a font with a large x-height. Palatino is an example of a font with a smaller x-height. Hence, New Century Schoolbook at 9-points is actually easier to read than Palatino at 10-points. One of the worst reading fonts is Times and Times New Roman -- unfortunately a very commonly used font for simple PDFs because it is one of the default fonts in the PDF reader. Too bad!

Anyway, thanks for prodding me about your question. Hope this helps!

[Tanzaku]

Originally Posted by Jadon

So in theory an eBookwise could follow every rule cited.

Very cool!

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jadon

A plus having a set font size or two like the eBookwise is that it can produce texts without widows or orphans, and my conversion CSS file does that. I'm of the ragged-right school, since adding soft hyphens to allow smooth justification is too much work for my personal conversions. I do have Tidy make straight quotemarks and apostrophes curly. I've never before read of any "no one-letter words at the end of lines" rule, and three random paperbacks I just looked at don't seem to have, either. But the hard-space method could let me cater to it if desired, just as more extensive work to soft-hyphenate long words could let me get smooth justification even at the large font size I use. So in theory an eBookwise could follow every rule cited.

I pretty much do what you do. I only add soft-hypens when I notice that the large font doesn't flow as well as I might like, particularly in a table (although sometimes I just force the small font for a table). Have you get everything automated?

Dale

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

No, we're still fussing with the template and will have some more samples with the various suggestions from this thread. What font size are you comfortable with? The draft PDF was as 9-point font for the basic text.

BTW, another option we are looking at is using a font with a larger x-height. (The x-height is essentially the size of the lower half of the letter -- for example the full height of the letter "e" but only the part of the letter "t" below the cross.) Fonts with a larger x-height are easier to read at the same font size. Examples: New Century Schoolbook is an example of a font with a large x-height. Palatino is an example of a font with a smaller x-height. Hence, New Century Schoolbook at 9-points is actually easier to read than Palatino at 10-points. One of the worst reading fonts is Times and Times New Roman -- unfortunately a very commonly used font for simple PDFs because it is one of the default fonts in the PDF reader. Too bad!

Anyway, thanks for prodding me about your question. Hope this helps!

It is not the size of the font that needs changing. It is the page size of the PDF itself. PDF files on e-Book devices are shrunk to align the page with the 6" image thus his comment about the font size.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

No, we're still fussing with the template and will have some more samples with the various suggestions from this thread. What font size are you comfortable with? The draft PDF was as 9-point font for the basic text.

BTW, another option we are looking at is using a font with a larger x-height. (The x-height is essentially the size of the lower half of the letter -- for example the full height of the letter "e" but only the part of the letter "t" below the cross.) Fonts with a larger x-height are easier to read at the same font size. Examples: New Century Schoolbook is an example of a font with a large x-height. Palatino is an example of a font with a smaller x-height. Hence, New Century Schoolbook at 9-points is actually easier to read than Palatino at 10-points. One of the worst reading fonts is Times and Times New Roman -- unfortunately a very commonly used font for simple PDFs because it is one of the default fonts in the PDF reader. Too bad!

Anyway, thanks for prodding me about your question. Hope this helps!

In Book Designer, I like to use 11point as the main font size. The size of the page should be 90mmx120mm which is 3.54x4.72 inches. 9 point is just way too small font he base font. The only time I use 9 point is sometimes for the ToC.

[Jadon]

Have you get everything automated?

Not remotely. I convert whatever format I start with to HTML, then run that through BookFixer, then edit that in The Semware Editor. There I add various things, like a title block and changing headers for an anthology, say. And I make lots of substitutions and checks, like searching for and fixing &ldquo;</p> from where Tidy gets confused. A 300-page novel might take a half-hour of editing, and that just gets it to my good-enough standards. I won't find OCR errors, or plenty of other things, but I'll get the formatting up to a level where I might be able to read ten pages between annoying errors.