Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
Love the definition of "rivers". I've seen those before and just hate them, but didn't know there was an actual term for them. Nice!
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More important than "Rivers" is "typographical grey".
You look at the page with half closed eyes, so you do not recognize text, just grey smudges and the page must look uniform. Some people hold the page at arms-length and upside down when assessing how evenly the text fills the page.
There is software that can typeset a page almost as well as a trained human typographer. Adobe InDesign has elaborate algorithms, open-source TeX has even more sophisticated tests. Unfortunately an average e-book reader (a person) doesn't really care enough to warrant implementing such algorithms for e-book reading devices. Sigh ... what can you expect when there are loads of texts that aren't even proofread, or are little more than raw OCR dumps.
Just have a close look at capital letter 'T' in serif font on any reader. The "arms" of the T are asymmetrical. Even Amazon Kindle 3 that boasts hand-tweaked font Caecilia has this "feature". Hand-tweaked Caecilia contains directly bitmaps for those few sizes used to display books and yet, capital 'T' is just as ugly as on all other readers regardless of rendering algorithm. Yes, I have ... aehm ... obtained ;-) Caecilia font files from Kindle 3 and I have had a look in FontForge.