Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
... I never once, or almost never, cared about the font, the font size, the page margins, the line spacing, etc. Except when one of these features presented some issue, and that was very rare, I wasn't even aware of them.
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This is because the vast majority of the books in the past were typeset by skilled trained professionals. By hand, using very complicated machines or using software. There was always a [trained] human eye to judge the final layout of the page. And they had hundreds of years worth of accumulated know-how of how to typeset the page properly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Personally I think ereaders are a huge improvement over paper in a lot of ways, mostly involving convenience and very much because of front lights. But maybe the biggest change they've brought us is a huge increase of the nit-picking population.  |
Up until very recently e-ink readers had atrocious [from the typographical point-of-view] screen resolution forcing manufacturers to use aggressive hinting, slab-serif or sans-serif fonts ...
The vast majority of readers have 6" screen and if you combine the width of screen with large margins and relatively large fonts mean there is way too few characters per line. With short line-with you get lots of typographical ... issues.
On the top of that, in most of the readers a typography is an afterthought, so you have to tinker with the fonts, margins, justification to get the least atrocious layout.