(Originally posted in the Iriver forum where it aroused little interest!)
I'm looking at the beta epub of my first book on my Iriver, and I must say I'm disturbed by the occasional long gaps at the right end of lines, since I have used left alignment. I've looked at some of the other books on my Iriver, and every one appears to be justified, and only rarely is there a noticeable gap in the middle or serious hyphenation. In fact, I haven't noticed any hyphenation.
In the course of searching for tips on this on the forum, I've discovered that one can apparently turn justification on and off on the Kindle <spit
> and I wonder if anyone has found a similar option on the Iriver. I haven't.
I'm also wondering how justification can work in an epub book, since the composer doesn't know in what screen format and font the book is going to be displayed. I know that all word processors worth their salt can do conditional hyphenation, so that the word I just used can be hy-phen-a-ted in one of several places, more or less as I just wrote it, and the hyphen appears at the actual point of break. But do all word processors use the same symbol for a conditional hyphenation, and do all e-readers understand that. And how about Calibre and Sigil, how would they handle it?
I managed to find this thread in the forum about justified vs left alignment, and the readers seem to be more or less evenly split in their preferences with perhaps a slight advantage for justified, based only on the first page or so.
So, how does one fix justification in an epub book,