Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
If that's a true representation of the printed pages, I'd demand my money back if I bought it. Ragged right, truncated descenders, missing punctuation and weird spacing on the quote marks. A really bad bit of typesetting.
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i think that's just a bad scan. i bought 2 of those wodehouse books in the london airport ; looking at my editions in person they *are* aligned to the left with a ragged right, which is why i linked to them in the first place, of course. however, all ascenders and descenders are intact, i see no "weird spacing" anywhere, and the type is perfectly clean and nice.
we are used to seeing justified text in print books, and so some people have come to associate this convention with "good" or "correct" typesetting.
i disagree. it is *one* style of typesetting, but not the only one, or the best one, and certainly not indicated in every circumstance.
in fact, justified text is technically
more difficult to read, particularly on longer lines, as the eye has no landmarks to help it keep its place as it scans back and forth across the page. and if it is used on short lines or on a text containing a lot of very long words it can give very bad results with large gaps in the line and "rivers" of white space. this is often the case with auto-justified reflowable text, thus my personal preference for left-alignement instead for ebooks.
justified text is a convention of the (printed) book... but
so is paper. i'm pretty sure it's been demonstrated to all of us that paper is not the only or the best way to read.
