Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Put an ePub on your Sony that uses Charis. . . .
I took a look at Charis using ADE for Windows and I did not see that the Sony was doing anything to force it to look better. I did not see any lines that were thin.
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Strange that you would hold Sony up as the paragon of font rendering when there have been so many complaints about Sony's poor font choices on the PRS-x50 readers.
Like the HIDEOUS font that Sony provides as THE ONLY OPTION for all .txt files.
Load up a .txt file on your Sony and you will see EXACTLY THE SAME ISSUES that you described for the Charis font on the Nook.
On my Sony, while viewing .txt or LRF files with the default font, the descender on the lower case letter 'g' turns into a hairline that is barely even visible because of EXACTLY the kind of 'thick line, thin line' problem you described.
Yes, EPUBs with Charis SIL embedded look a little better, thanks to ADEs font rendering on the Sony (thanks I suspect, to Adobe, NOT Sony) but even with EPUBs there are some fairly significant issues and limitations, thanks to Sony, that don't exist on most of their competitors.
- Like Sony's not providing a nice selection of user settable fonts like the Nooks.
- And Sony's poor choice for the single available default font.
- And Sony's not providing a way for users to load their own fonts onto the reader and set them as the default, which at least would have allowed them to fix the above issues (it took Kobo about a week to respond to user requests and add this feature, Sony has had YEARS and has done NOTHING)
As far as your complaints about Charis SIL's rendering on the Nook goes . . .
YES - Charis SIL does have large weight differences for different strokes in the font.
For example the left upward stroke of the letter 'W' is about TWICE as wide as the corresponding right side upward stroke.
This makes it challenging to render at smaller font sizes without some strokes becoming too thin, and it is indeed the responsibility of the font rendering engine to try to deal with this.
One compromise is to decrease the stroke weight differences as the font gets smaller, and to help with this, the font has 'hinting' and 'instructing' codes built in, but not all font rendering engines respond to this info, and those that do sometimes will still render differently at smaller font sizes.
I have looked at the Nook STR, and did NOT find that the font rendering was all that bad, but the early Kindles had some issues with font anti-aliasing and rendering, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Nook STR could also be improved by a tweak or two.
I suspect that B&N may be just using the default Android font rendering, and it may not yet have been fully optimized for eInk (since there are few eInk Android devices other than the Nook STR).
Either way, since Charis SIL has indeed been used as an embedded font in a large number of commercially published books in EPUB format, I wouldn't worry about this too much, because if tweaking is needed, I am sure that B&N will respond. The early Nook's got new software updates fairly quickly when changes were needed.
On the other hand, I wouldn't make any bets on your odds of having Sony release an update to fix the default font readability issues, or the lack of other font options, on the PRS-x50 readers.
Based on Sony's past performance, the odds wouldn't be in your favor.