Quote:
Originally Posted by ctol
Interesting discussion here. Many valid points made on both sides of the argument. But let me play a little devil's advocate here for a moment; what about a poet or author whose work full justification would completely ruin the style of his/her work? I am speaking specifically of one of my favorite poets e.e. cummings. Would you folks not read his work in ebook form just because some of his poetry does not lend itself to either right or left justification.
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Full justification is deadly for any poetry. And I've read cummings. Some of his stuff should not be flush
left, let alone fully justified.
You face the issue of how precise a control the reader provides over just where the individual words get placed on a page. Some forms, like "concrete" poetry, may be effectively impossible unless you use a PDF file.
And if typography is important, there are further compromises. I had a discussion with a friend who is a DTP specialist for a major trade publisher, and made it clear to her management that she wants to be involved in ebook production. "If the book designer specifies 11 pt Monotype Bembo on 12 for the body copy, the ebook reader doesn't
have Monotype Bembo, and won't have that fine a control over line spacing. What you will do will be only an approximation based on what the reader
can do, and what the reader can do will be constrained by the platform it runs on ." She got it.
You also face the issues involved when fonts must change in the book, like books on programming where the author's text is in a justified proportional font, but snippets of program code are in an unjustified monospaced font where indentation is critical. If the ebook viewer can't do that, you really don't want to try to read the book on it.
Web designers have been wrestling with this for years, as what the viewer sees is constrained by what fonts are installed on their machines, and browsers are programmed with defaults that the user
should have as fallbacks if the font the designer specifies isn't present.
To a large extent, book design becomes a casualty when ebooks are in question. I expect those constraints to ease as the technology improves, but there are still a lot of cases where you either use a PDF or don't read it in electronic form.
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Dennis