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Old 08-22-2015, 07:26 AM   #250
paipa
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Device: Kindle Paperwhite 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
If you're saying that the actual work on typesetting is done elsewhere (by the "kfxgen" tool that's presumably used to create kfx files) and that the Kindle simply contains a rendering engine, then yes, I agree with you, and that's the sensible way to do it. Typesetting takes a great deal of processing power (as you'll know if you've used a tool such as LaTex), and it makes sense to do it offline rather than slow down the Kindle by doing it locally.
Fair point.

Although, does it really take that much power? I can soft-hyphenate War and Peace in a matter of seconds on my computer, so even on a Kindle it's likely to be much less work than indexing it, which is an overhead we are used to. Ligature replacement is trivial and has a computational cost as close to zero as it gets. Kerning is also very light on processing power. If a Kobo can do it fine then so should a Kindle.

What I find frustrating is that these are all simple things and there's just no reason Amazon shouldn't have solved these long ago. We're not talking about LaTeX-like typesetting capabilities here. Single page single column static text is the lowest of the low hanging fruit.
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