Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
I see your point, but it's "unfortunate" in that the software is not intelligent enough to make formatting choices based on good rules of typography. That's all that would be required. TeX and InDesign use basically the same paragraph layout engine, and they take into account whitespace rivers and so on. HTML layout engines don't care and will just throw it down on the screen based on font size and line fitting alone, and of course hyphenation is not even considered in most e-format layout engines. Given the lack of intelligent software design, allowing the user to just randomly choose any level of font size unfortunately does result in some pretty ugly page layouts. Hopefully this will improve with time. It's just pathetic watching the e-publishing industry re-invent the wheel when perfectly good solutions already exist that are light-years ahead of where the industry is today.
|
In fairness, ebook readers have pretty wimpy CPUs, in order to avoid draining the battery. InDesign and TeX don't have to worry about such constraints. So a full-blown solution is probably not feasible on today's ereaders.
Did you know Amazon has a typography team in Cupertino, where Kindle is developed? There's a current job listing for someone to manage it. Hope they get someone good...