Quote:
Originally Posted by AaronShep
It's a nice sentiment, but what I've seen over and over is that people are conditioned to favor poor typography because that's what they're used to nowadays. So, principles of good typography that were developed over centuries have been discarded in favor of the preferences of engineers raised on Microsoft Word. I don't think anyone with a grounding in book typography would see the Kindle's typography as any better than a necessary evil.
Still, I wouldn't object to reader control if that's actually what we were offered. But if it's a choice between Amazon's dictating the typography or me, I won't willingly leave it in the hands of people who have proven themselves clueless.
Aaron
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As an old TeX hand, it has appalled me for years that very few typesetting systems approach what TeX achieved thirty years ago, and those which do make an effort have done so pretty much by straight copying of TeX's core algorithms. However that gripe is not the point of my post; rather it is to ask if anyone is interested in a piece of code I wrote a few years ago when the Kindle first came out, which takes an HTML file and 'manually' inserts & shy; characters into words at the points determined by TeX's hyphenation algorithm. I never released it at the time I wrote it because the use of & shy; as the equivalent of TeX's \- discretionary hyphen was not its intended purpose; however it worked, and I used it, but I didn't want to release something that would entrench non-standard codification in published documents, in case Amazon corrected their reading software and suddenly all the soft hyphens became visible. However at this point that is unlikely to happen (in fact I think the original definition of the soft hyphen character has been forgotten - it was probably a faulty specification anyway...) and if the discretionary-hyphen-insertion software is still of interest I'll package it up and release it.
PS The original meaning of & shy; is apparently not entirely forgotten: this old posting summarizes the issues:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html