Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
No. The vast majority of typographic principles apply perfectly well to reflowable systems. The fixed layout offered by PDF only really comes into play qith regard to complex designs.
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But it seems, judging by Amazon's success and effect on the ereader industry, the "vast majority" of what readers want in their e-reading experience is already accommodated by even the smaller subset of feature that mobi offers on eink devices.
I would argue that there is far greater volume of work that is better served by a fixed layout (all the "...For Dummies" books come immediately to mind...I've now officially given up trying to read "Chess for Dummies" on my Kindle) than would be substantively served by only those features that ePub offers over mobi, as nice to have as they might be.
Put another way, when you are talking about works that are seriously diminished by lack of embeddable fonts and certain kinds of indents, or certain nested table structures, then you are most probably talking about complex designs.
if you are restricting yourself to some arbitrary subset that is ONLY needing those specific features to make the difference between a great experience and poor experience, I can only imagine that is a pretty darn small subset, and in those case, the publisher could always save the day by, say, including the critically indented and styled elements as images even in a mobi, if they were that important. I believe this is done now.