Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
For what its worth: MS Reader did good typography on even the earliest Pocket PCs running 200MHz ARM CPUs.
(Of course MS has quality typographical code that ran well on 8MHz 286s, back in the DOS days when they had to code their own printer drivers.)
It's not the CPU, since the software doesn't have to render the entire book at once, just the page being displayed. That should not require 1 GHz CPU unless you're talking JAVA. (And Kindle is raw Linux, no?)
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The Kindle SDK at least is Java. But at least according to Oracle (Sun), Java is 'on par' with C/C++ for most applications. Nobody would use it on embedded systems if it weren't.
And ok, you've convinced me that CPU is not particularly a constraint here in terms of layout.
But a small screen is, particularly when using larger text sizes. It becomes impossible to even out all the white space when you cannot get the measure, point size, and leading in balance (because the user controls point size, and measure is fixed). Hyphenation can't help when these factors are out of balance.
There are a lot of things they can correct: why don't they permit line breaks after em dashes? Why not more image placement options? Why not allow a right margin to be set? At least they should bring it up to parity with ePub in terms of styling.