Quote:
Originally Posted by AlanHK
I know some people leap into things like media queries and try to code for every device separately, I don't have the time and am not earning enough from this one job to devote the time and money (to buy hardware) to make it work. So I use the simplest, least demanding code that works in all cases.
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@AlanHK: You are probably sensible in your priorities. I'll add a couple of observations:
- The aesthetic advantage of using SVG instead of raster formats for inline glyphs is that the anti-aliasing is more or less the same as for ordinary text, giving nice crisp outlines. Rasters will very often have a slight fuzziness and jaggedness. The quality of scaling algorithms also vary between e-readers. I've had some bad experiences with PNG downscaling, and now use GIF instead for loss-free compression.
However, as long as you get the scaling of your character image right, you should get a result satisfacory for all but the most discerning readers...
- Kindle for iOS seems like a near complete train wreck to me. Even with an iPad and Mac available, there seems no way of converting anything except trivial texts to a decent version.
- Specifying width in em's doesn't seem to work for mobi-only devices, you have to have a fixed size. To ensure a sufficient DPI, I specify the width and height HTML attributes (not as CSS). However, this requires use of media queries
(Anybody know of a better way?)
- The Previewer isn't quite up to the job (but you've probably noticed that already). I particularly miss proper support for media queries and the opportunity to change line spacing.
- And let's not forget that some devices, particularly older ones, have pretty limited UTF-8 support, so that even with embedded fonts, you risk getting just a '?'