Quote:
Originally Posted by ChaoZ
In doing some research last night, I downloaded a sample of Stranger in a Strange Land and compared it to an old physical copy that I have. Interestingly, once I fiddled with the font size and width a bit (on the Kindle PC app), it wasn't too far off. Hyphenation is an issue, but it's not too distracting. The font was actually clearer than my old paperback.
What kinda annoyed me is inconsistency with italics and such.
It'd be fine for novels for the most part, but as illustrated in the example posted before, captions and illustrations would suck. And what about footnotes?
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Footnotes aren't really workable in any of the current e-formatting standards. These are usually formatted as endnotes with a link in the text to go back and forth. It's a little cumbersome, but not too bad.
The truly sad thing about typography in e-formatting is that the creators of the various standards went more with either hypertext markup or a similar design, basically a web engine. Ridiculous and woefully inadequate for generating a seriously professional look to the text. The sad thing is they could have used TeX as a markup language and had something right out of the box that generated truly professional looking print on the screen. Another missed opportunity by bumbling corporations that don't know their butt from a hole in the ground.