Thread: Ugly formatting
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Old 12-11-2007, 04:51 PM   #22
Tanzaku
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Anacortes, WA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir View Post
I am very surprised that InDesign does not have tool for automatically dealing with this.
Yes, you are right, it does. In fact, that's the exact pattern for GREP or basic TEXT replacements. The draft document we posted has already had the single word "I[space]" replaced with "I[nonbreaking space]" to illustrate the point. We simply haven't yet run the rest of the bad-boy offenders through their paces yet.

As to the serif versus non-serif issue, again you are right. The common wisdom is to use non-serif fonts for screen displays and serif fonts for the text of printed displays. So, which category does the eBook fall into? Printed or screen? Or somewhere in between -- in which case, it is debatable which camp this technology falls into. We do, indeed, live in interesting times.

BTW, I see that Hadrien has responded with a post in this thread. I am most impressed with Feedbooks approach to this problem and their results are very good for the current state of the art. I have no doubt that as time goes on their algorithms will get better and better. At least I hope so! I love their approach to customizing the PDF creation with personalized fonts, margins, and headers/footers. Very user friendly. I can see a time when they will have customizable leading, hyphenation, paragraph styles, etc that will easily approach the kind of professional layout possible with InDesign -- but customizable on the fly. They are actually not that far from it now and clearly demonstrate a keen knowledge of the PDF architecture. So, if you are not familiar with their site, may I give them a plug?
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