[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck

It's actually not very time-consuing to make a good-looking ebook if you know what you're doing, and care enough about the result to put in that time. There are people on the forum who could do it in their sleep.

Yeah, me, myself and I for example. If I feel like it.

The problem is that many (most?) publishers treat epubs as music files: as long as it's an mp3 (epub), it'll have the same content, it's good enough, right? Cheap wins the day. Subcontractors (or the resident geek) who actually does the conversion might not be very good at it, and the results are as you observe in many commercial epubs. WotC either got lucky, or cares enough about digital versions to do a similar amount of QC to what they do with their paper releases. I suspect the latter (where would you expect to find a higher percentage of nerds than amongst people working for WotC, after all?), and more publishers should follow their example.

If you're thinking that EPUB's are created, then you are wrong. They are generated. I've opened more than enough of them (WotC and others), and the ones from the same publisher invariably are coded exactly the same, down to the last detail.

And even the WotC EPUB's have mistakes, such as a negative margin between "Chapter 5" and "This is the title", making the lower text clash with the upper.

There are a few reasons to embed fonts:
* The designers want the look of a particular font for presentation reasons.

A designer should learn *PRONTO* that electronic media is not print media, and that users will want to choose their own fonts and sizes. So if a designer is doing fixed layout/fixed fonts on websites or ebooks, then s/he's doing it wrong.

* Your text might include special glyphs that are not present in standard fonts (I work in academia, and many researcher's names have strange letters in them).

Then embed a font with those glyphs, and use it for the words that need those special characters; not for the entire text.

* The most common reason is probably that the sweatshop/resident geek doing it haven't really given it it any thought, and left that option enabled in Indesign or whatever tool they're using.

Like... 90% of the time? I see Charis A LOT. It basically seems to be the defacto default for commercial EPUBs. Is Charis the default for Indesigner?

The first reason can have merit in a few special cases. A classic might have a better presentation with an old-looking font, see "Three Men and a Dog" in the download section here for an example.
The second is strictly necessary in a few cases, but the third... well, I'll let you guess what I think about that That, along with justification and line height, is a decision based on taste more than anything. There are really no "right" choices, mostly what designers prefer. As a reader I prefer indens, no spacing, and that is by far the most common in our area of publishing.

As a designer of electronic long text media, you don't prefer *anything*, except maybe for chapter headings, title pages, illustrations, that sort of stuff. You let the user decide through the settings on his device. So you don't fix your fonts, sizes, line heights, or anything, because then you are possibly disabling features of the device the user is reading on; the features for which he bought the device in the first place.

On a side note it also has a significant effect on readability, which might be a consideration for some categories of books. We published a book about reading disabilities (paper edition), and the authors (experts in the area) had some very stringent requirements: The text should have a larger line height, shorter line length (larger font size was what we chose), "ragged right", spacing between paragraphs, and a sans-serif font. This would make it easier to read for people with reading disabilities, who were among the target audience. I learnt a lot about readability working with those guys, but I must admit that the result looked horrible to me

In paper, there is nothing else to do than to adhere to the requirements. A lot of stuff you are mentioning, maybe even everything (I have doubt about the justification), can be done by the device used, if you *DON'T* fix these options in the source of your file.