Quote:
Originally Posted by mrmikel
Interesting design question how you lay out a book when it can suddenly become a large print book. Makes narrow columns and pull quotes not so pretty.
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Floating pullquotes will break at a certain size font... and even small tables at three columns wide will (most likely) go off the screen.
Couple this with a small device (smartphone, ereader, tablet), and you break nearly all design decisions beyond the very basics (left/center/right alignment, margins, padding, bold/italics/smallcaps, ...).
Here is an actual EPUB that I posted + code + images showing a floating box that I use (it looks good at small/medium fonts, and breaks at larger fonts):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=222952
This also brings up the whole what to do with Tables... You have the camp who would plop an image of the table into the EPUB, and the camp that converts the table fully to HTML.
I tend go on the side of the HTML tables:
Pros:
- It follows all user preferences
- font, font-sizes, margins, ...
- Extremely small file size
- It is HTML, which compresses VERY well
- Perfectly crisp digital text.
- Follows CSS.
- This allows you to easily update the look of all tables in one fell swoop.
- Easy to edit
- In some cases, you might want to "verticalize" a table (to make it easier to read on a small/thin device).
- Searchable
- Copy/Pastable
Cons:
- The table may flow off the edge of the device at large font-sizes.
- May not transfer well to a device which cannot handle tables (original Kindle).
Tables as Images:
Pros:
- Can easily scale the image to fit an entire table on any device size.
- Will look the same on all devices (Kindle, Nook, PC, Kobo, ....)
- Easy to code (just treat it like any image)
- Works on any device as long as it can display that image format.
Cons:
- Does not follow user preferences
- On a small device, even if you stretch the image to fill up the entire screen, the actual information in the table can be unreadable.
- Although there are certain readers where you can click on an image, and pan/scan the full resolution image.
- Once you create the image, it is stuck at that resolution
- The thing that irked me initially about these was the EXTREMELY small resolution certain tables were inserted with. On higher resolution/larger devices, these images will become unreadable postage stamps.
- I see this problem getting only worse as the really high resolution devices come out (think newest Kindle).
- Text in the image does not scale well.
- Depending on how many tables/images there are in the book, this can seriously bloat your EPUB.
- Not easily editable.
- Not searchable.
- Let us say you come back to your book when a future format has come out (let us say, a decade from now), you will have to redo all of these images and update them to higher quality/resolution.
It is up to you to weigh the pros/cons of the design decisions, and keep this in mind when designing the ebook.
I personally believe trying to match the look of the original book will outweigh the con of someone somewhere making an
EXTREMELY LARGE size font on their small ereader.