Quote:
Originally Posted by Tanzaku
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? |
Cusomizable leading, hyphenation and paragraph style could be possible too.
I'm wondering about something: currently, you're working on custom reg-exp in order to remove common typesetting mistakes. Are you planning on distributing these patterns ? It would be very interesting for everyone to create a database with all the useful patterns to fix common problems.
These could be used in any new software, and improve the overall look of every book available.
Maybe we should add a special wiki page for this ?
As for the Feedbooks approach: I believe that it's important to have choice and flexibility. For both the Cybook and iLiad, Feedbooks already offer 2 choice: Mobipocket for something flexible, yet not as nice from a typesetting point of view, or PDF files for better typesetting/presentation but without the ability to change the font on the device. As soon as Sony add Digital Editions support, it'll be the case too: epub for flexible formatting, PDF for fixed layout.