Quote:
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Originally Posted by fireproof
13x17cm
Margins: left and right 0.2cm
top and bottom: 0.5cm
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You're probably doing this the wrong way round, I think. It's not (or should not be) a question of cramming as much onto the page as it can hold -- it's a question of balancing a typeface, and a line length against surrounding space. Margin space will almost certainly help improving readability -- but I won't be able to say until I actually have an iLiad in front of my eyes.
A quick check of one of the texts you have (The Abandoned Room, in iLiad format), I would say that you could easily make the margins wider without problems (or, alternatively, add a little extra space between the lines). But you have other problems that really should be taken care of first: the text is (to my eyes) illegible. Here's why:
Empty lines are used instead of paragraph indentation: this gives the page a very patchy look, which detracts from reading. Longer paragraphs do fairly well, but dialogue looks awful. I'm almost sure that closing up the empty lines, doing proper indentation *and* increasing margins would actually save pages in the end. (On a low-resolution device, such as the average PC screen, the empty lines may help a bit, but the iLiad is at least medium res, if not hi res.)
You really should use proper quotes, and dashes. They help a lot in understanding what's in the quote and what's not: inch signs " don't give any help at all. (yes, I know: Gutenberg texts are not exactly know for caring about such niceties: they need preprocessing.)
And if you can do something about widows, try to do so: page 81 gives me shudders with the single word at the top. (It's not an easy thing, I admit, particularly not if you generate files on the fly. )
Less problematical, but still ugly is the page heading: avoid boldface -- it attracts attention, and there's no reason for that in a page heading. Personally, I would leave the header out, and have chapter structure as bookmarks, and also leave pagination to the PDF reader. (But again, that may be dificult to do on the fly.)
As you probably figured out by now, I care very much about typography: I think most PDF eBooks available today are unacceptably ugly, but that they could, with a little work and care, be made much better-looking. That may make me go in the entirely opoosite way than most others.
It's probably a bit unfair to criticize without giving an opportunity to return the favour: I'm trying to create what I think of as good PDF eBooks, and these may be useful as a contrast. See some of
my own attempts here. (Ignore the chess books, please -- they're intended to be printed on a high-res printer, not for on-line reading.) On the other hand ... I'm lucky if I can do one of these texts in about 12-15 hours.