Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Maybe you could be nice enough to give an example of program that outputs a nice typeset book no matter how long it takes.
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If you go into the Compatibility options of Microsoft Word, you'll see one for enabling "WordPerfect-style" justification. This style allows both expansion and compression of spaces between words, instead of just expansion, as you would normally see in a word processor or Web browser. And this style of justification, with both compression and expansion, is what you'll find in any page layout program. Without it, spacing between words in justified text is generally excessive, especially in narrow columns.
This option has been in Word for at least two decades, and as the name suggests, the style was standard in WordPerfect even before that. So, I doubt it would unduly tax even the processors in today's Kindles. In fact, it would take less processing power than the kerning introduced with the new layout engine.
The reason you don't get this on Kindle is that the Kindle developers themselves know nothing about typography. The advances announced for the new layout engine are just features of Webkit that the Kindle team has finally decided to turn on. They're just throwing switches. If book-style typography was available in Webkit, we'd get it on Kindle. But as it is, Amazon continues to give us screenshots of poor typography and bragging about its advances.
Aaron