Quote:
Originally Posted by igorsk
Erm, sorry? Very few eBook formats are fixed-page like PDF. Most are basically text streams with some formatting, because one of the major pros of eBooks is that they are reflowable and pages can be reformatted on the fly.
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Yes, the problem is more complicated than I mentioned. My eBookwise reader does not reformat on the fly per se. It seems to pre-format the 2 font sizes when the file is built. Sony can reformat but it doesn't actually do in on the fly either. It have a full processing step in batch mode the first time you select a font size (connect preformats all 3 sizes). As I think about it there are two problems. One of characters and pretty printing and the other is pagination issues. They may require different solutions.
The full justification issue requires kerning to be done correctly and I don't believe any current reader supports this. You need to adjust the spaces between the characters in words to make everything look good when the lines are short (as they are in readers with larger fonts) and even then there will always be a line that doesn't look right.
Hyphenation helps but, unless the book has a hyphenation dictionary built in this often results in funny breaks in the text that detract from the reading experience. In my eBookwise books I sometimes code soft hyphens in the source to aid in fixing this. Having soft hyphens in the source can alleviate the need for a hyphen dictionary in the reader.
There is actually many different topics to talk about in this thread but that is enough for now.
Dale