Quote:
Originally Posted by jhowell
I do not use EPUB readers, I use Kindles. As an experiment I converted your revised book using kindlegen and loaded it on an e-ink Kindle running the latest firmware version, 5.8.9.2. The SVG images displayed, but the text was a bit small for my eyes. Kindles have the ability to magnify images, but when I tried that with the SVG images they did not display correctly.
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(I am going to assume Figure 3-1 is typical of what you are describing.)
I think a few things are going on regarding the small text.
1. The smallest text is very small and light gray. It looks pretty bad in the PNGs. The PDF is even worse, with JPEG artifacts thrown in. I'm mildly curious if the commercial paper version used those or they received extra tweaking and how the figures look in the paper book. I kind of suspect that the smallest text isn't expected to actually be read.
2. The PW2 resolution might not quite be enough to display the text legibly without zooming the image enough to clip it.
3. You didn't say whether the images were full width or tried landscape, or whether the images were larger in landscape than portrait (for images wider than high).
I used ebook-convert from calibre to make an azw3 (FF8) version of Tex2002ans version of the epub. On my Kindle Voyage running version 5.6.1 the figures look great, with some caveats.
The good. The figures are full width minus margins at left and right. For figures too tall to support full width with preserved aspect ratio, the figures are full height minus margins at top and bottom and the width is reduced to preserve aspect ratio. Landscape works and again the figure is enlarged to best fill the frame with correct aspect ratio and imposed margin. In both portrait and landscape a long press on the image followed by tapping the + results in the image zooming enough that the smallest margins are only a few pixels just as for JPEG images in books bought from Amazon. When I did the same with a pre-Tex2002ans version, many of the images were small and attempted zooms gave bizarre results.
The caveats. The smallest text is still tiny in landscape and zoomed. Looking great is subjective. My glasses have polycarbonate lenses with progressive focus and happen to introduce glare. Polycarbone lenses don't attenuate light as much as sun glasses, but they do attenuate enough that in office lighting and darker I frequently can read better with my glasses off even for distances where the glasses give better focus. All this is to explain that I can't read the smallest text with my glasses on, but with my glasses off the smallest text is clear even in unzoomed portrait from about 12 inches.
I think Figure 3-1 on a PW2 in landscape would be comparable to on a Voyage in portrait mode, but physically larger.