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Old 02-16-2019, 07:45 AM   #7
GeoffR
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Quote:
Originally Posted by patrik View Post
Bought a new book today, and as it seems books from this author the size for standard text is "never" 1em. It's 0.933em (another book from him has 0.93em).

(He also uses larger right/left margins than most.)

Is this a cause of using something like Indesign or some other tool? Or is there an actual good reason for not having 1em? (For normal fiction, not poetry etc.)
Most likely just an artifact of the software used to create or convert the ebook, Maybe the original document had the font size for normal paragraphs set to 14pt, but the conversion software for some reason chose 15pt as the base font size to scale to, and so calculated the ebook font size for normal paragraphs as 14/15 = 0.933em.

However it could also be deliberate. Maybe the author tested the ebook on a reader that had a limited number of font size adjustment steps (some readers have a mere seven choices of font size!) and when they couldn't get the book to match their personal reading preferences by adjusting the font size from the reader they changed the size in the book instead. Same for the oversize margins, they probably look good when testing on a wide-screen PC.
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