Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
this is what I had in mind.
2% is 1.8mm on the Reader and that would be a *very* reasonable value for margin. In fact, when you create an rtf file with 0.01 size margin the reader starts text some 2 mm from the screen edge.
I have been reading from [very] small screens for years and I have acquired a taste for using as much screen real estate as possible.
Sony, on the other hand sells books that have something like +10mm margin and that is a waste of space. The first post in this thread shows Kindle with a text formated with an 8 mm left margin. I have just measured it. This is what I am grumbling about.
To make things worse the books from Sony Connect store have fully justified paragraphs. Full justification works great on an average printed page where there are quite a few words (or, more importantly, quite a few spaces) on the line. When you do a full justification combined with 6" screen, relatively large font and quite wide margins the width of space between words varies too much for me to be comfortable with.
I have done quite a lot of work in DTP, working in Aldus PageMaker, Quark and InDesign so I know what you are talking about. I have even been creating brochures and advertisement company materials for offset printing.
And do not let me started on the serif versus sans-serif and their readability on a very low resolution medium. And 160dpi of an e-ink screen is low. Very low. Isn't it? Please notice that most of the content you read on web pages - including this site - is in sans-serif font.
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actually, Nate is right, 160dpi resolution is quite good. print resolution is 300dpi (this is "high res"), and web (computer screen) is 72dpi. 160 for text is completely respectable and noticeably better than a computer moniter.
i don't think it's quite reasonable to use the same conventions when formatting for an 6" e-ink screen as for a telephone or pda screen (i assume this is what you meant, when you said you read on very very small screens). after all, even you say the corresponding tastes are "acquired"
they *definitely* are not high res, and as you say are significantly smaller. i can understand not wanting a margin there because you've barely got room for 2 words per line as it is ! but this is really a pretty lousy way to read, when you get right down to it, ok in a pinch but hopefully not your only option. there are many many details of text and page layout and the reading experience which must be compromised / abandoned.
current e-ink screens might not be *completely* comparable to a printed text yet, but they are definitely several orders of magnitude closer than a telephone screen and i think (somewhat modified) print conventions apply better than telephone screen conventions. so for instance, serif typefaces display *horribly* on a telephone screen and it makes no sense to use there. however, overall they are more comfortable to read for long passages than sans-serif, which are usually reserved for titles and legends and such, rather than body text. i feel confident that e-ink screens can *already* display serif typefaces well, so why not use them ?
you're right that it's best to avoid full justification on reflowable text ; this is only partly because of the line length (on my eb1150, at a small type-size, i beleive i can fit about as many characters as a typical small paperback) ; rather, it's because you can't adjust the tracking (the space between letters) and so you invariably get a page full of "holes", as you described. not good !