Ugly formatting

[llasram]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by llasram

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.)

Your PDF does look good. But there is one slight gotcha with it. Some of the chapters start in the middle of the page. It would (to me) be preferable if the Chapters all started on a new page.

[ath]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Some of the chapters start in the middle of the page. It would (to me) be preferable if the Chapters all started on a new page.

Chapters start in many ways: from the very open chapter that starts on odd-numbered pages only, to the very close chapter that carries a minimal indication of new chapter (some of Folio Society's books do chapters by four or five lines of space, followed by the chapter number as 2- or 3-line drop caps.) The latter was usually used when there were very many and short chapters, with only minimal chapter indicators, and the 'chapters on new page only' treatment broke up the text more than was desirable ... or when its avoidance helped keep the page count, hence the printing costs, down.

In this particular case, the choice of chapter treatment does not appear to be out of line with respect to the book: chapters seem pretty short, so keeping 'formal chapter indicators' (such as new pages, text 'chapter', and this and that much white space) fairly low seems motivated.

Far too many widow lines, the apparently gratuitous mixing of very disparate typefaces in the first line of every chapter, as well as several very bad hyphenations, grate more on the eye, I think.

As this is an automatically produced book, only the typeface issue can be fixed. Bad hyphenations can be avoided, but it usually takes lot of manual work to do that, and widows almost always need manual tweaking of pages.