12-17-2008, 02:29 PM | #16 | |
Reticulator of Tharn
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12-17-2008, 02:47 PM | #17 | |
zeldinha zippy zeldissima
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well, it surprised me at first too, but actually i got used it really quickly. i don't think it's ugly.
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12-17-2008, 04:28 PM | #18 | |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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If that's a true representation of the printed pages, I'd demand my money back if I bought it. Ragged right, truncated descenders, missing punctuation and weird spacing on the quote marks. A really bad bit of typesetting.
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12-17-2008, 04:40 PM | #19 | |
zeldinha zippy zeldissima
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we are used to seeing justified text in print books, and so some people have come to associate this convention with "good" or "correct" typesetting. i disagree. it is *one* style of typesetting, but not the only one, or the best one, and certainly not indicated in every circumstance. in fact, justified text is technically more difficult to read, particularly on longer lines, as the eye has no landmarks to help it keep its place as it scans back and forth across the page. and if it is used on short lines or on a text containing a lot of very long words it can give very bad results with large gaps in the line and "rivers" of white space. this is often the case with auto-justified reflowable text, thus my personal preference for left-alignement instead for ebooks. justified text is a convention of the (printed) book... but so is paper. i'm pretty sure it's been demonstrated to all of us that paper is not the only or the best way to read. |
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12-17-2008, 10:47 PM | #20 | |
Feedbooks.com Co-Founder
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Once again, it's very important to avoid mixing issues related to the reading system (Digital Editions) with issues linked to the format. |
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12-18-2008, 06:25 AM | #21 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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But there is well-justified text and bad-justified text. Well-justified text does not use the simplistic "fill this line as much as you can, then expand spaces and break" algorithm, it instead tries to find the break points in the whole paragraph that will result in the most uniform distribution of text among the lines, ideally it would use hyphenation when needed and, of course, it doesn't have very long lines (around 66 characters is considered right). Something like TeX does. Bad-justified text is just the opposite, and sometimes left-aligned is better than bad-justified, I agree there, but well-justified is better than both. In sum, the option should be there, in the reader software. |
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12-18-2008, 06:27 AM | #22 | ||
zeldinha zippy zeldissima
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12-18-2008, 07:11 AM | #23 | |
frumious Bandersnatch
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Well, left-aligned text is usually preferable with very short lines, as in magazines or newspapers with narrow columns, where finding appropriate break points is very hard/impossible. So at the end I guess it depends on the font size you have in your reader (I like a smallish font myself). |
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12-18-2008, 07:21 AM | #24 |
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Did you find the justification on the CyBook to be bad, Zelda?
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12-18-2008, 08:14 AM | #25 | ||
zeldinha zippy zeldissima
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here is a photo of a book on the cybook with justified text. it demonstrates the irregular gaps and "rivers" of white space which i have been talking about. i didn't look particularly hard to find it ; it is the 2nd page of that book, using the font-size i find comfortable to use (i didn't modify it just for the photo, in other words). it's pretty egregious, i'm sure you'll agree. it's exactly why i don't like automatic justification on reflowable texts. even with hyphenation i'm not sure it would necessarily give a better result ; i've seen some texts with 3 or more hyphens in a row, and that is just as bad. here i clearly prefer left alignement. |
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12-18-2008, 08:47 AM | #26 |
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I generally read with a much smaller font size, at which full justification works a lot better. You're right - at that font size, left justification is better. Nice to give the user the choice, of course!
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12-18-2008, 09:07 AM | #27 |
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I agree with Jellby that TeX does an excellent job with very strict rules and support for both kerning and hyphenation if you enable the right stuff.
You even need to change a few settings otherwise the rules are too strict for a 6" document... |
12-18-2008, 11:12 AM | #28 |
frumious Bandersnatch
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My point is, a similar algorithm used for creating the PDF could be used by the readers to reflow text. So, as I said elsewhere, the problem with justification is not justification per se, but the often too simplistic algorithms implemented.
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12-18-2008, 11:17 AM | #29 |
Grand Sorcerer
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I read with the fourth smallest size and you get a lot of disturbing white spaces at this size also.
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12-18-2008, 11:18 AM | #30 | |
zeldinha zippy zeldissima
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i do think that in the end it should be a choice left to the user. however i also think that perhaps it's important to stop considering justification the only valid way of presenting text, and consider instead that it is one option of several, equally valid. |
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