Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
I think what the author of that study was trying to point out, and rightly so, is that there are some documents or parts of some documents that do not lend themselves well to resizing fonts. The fanaticism many people have on these boards toward a totally resizeable, completely user-controlled document really only works with a plain-text book. For any other kind of document or for parts of a document that contains tables or graphs or captions, etc., resizing these can have very detrimental effects. A true e-publishing standard should take that into account and allow for a part of a document that doesn't just blindly increase the size of all text when the user presses the zoom button. This is just another shortcoming of the current blunt design of e-reading formats and is another example of how this entire e-publishing industry is still in its infancy.
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I guess I'm one of those fanatics. While I would certainly appreciate more intelligent resizing algorithms for some types of things (and, indeed, some devices do provide better solutions for images), I can not understand why anyone would think it unfortunate to be able to resize, even if the option results in badly-formatted tables and such.
In the actual article, the author's concern seemed to be that freedom to resize means that the algorithm for "full" justification often leaves unsightly rivers. It is certainly true that the software often does a poor job in that regard, but I just don't understand why choice--the ability of the reader to decide which problem is more troubling to a particular reader, legibility or aesthetics--should ever be "unfortunate."