Quote:
Originally Posted by hobnail
Threadjack: all of this discussion about being able to set the font size, line height, etc. makes me wonder (again) why it is that some/many of us gnash our teeth when we start reading an ebook that has wonky settings for these things. I can't ever remember having this reaction with any printed book. Is it because printed books are typeset by people who automatically avoid the excesses that bother us? Or it something about us being able to fix an ebook? I suspect it's the former; for example, I've pointed out before that I've gone through a bunch of printed novels/fiction that I have and none of them ever use a sans serif typeface; sans serif is only used in technical, cookbooks, programming, how-to, etc. books.
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For example, Kobo (unpatched) has settings for margins, font size, and line height. If the eBook has L/R margins that are too wide, you cannot make then any less wide. If the eBook has a line height set, the settings cannot make that any less wide. If the eBook has offset text at a smaller font size, that cannot be made any larger without also making the other body text larger. Windows and orphans default to 2 and that is annoying. So in order to be able to use the settings and to be able to not have windows and orphans, the eBooks have to be edited. I like a narrow line height and narrow margins. I also like all of the body text to be the same size. I also don't like most chapter heading that waste a lot of screen space. Sometimes you see offset text with just a left margin specified. That doesn't look good. And paragraph spaces, I get rid of those and make sure there are indents where there shoud be and I use an indent of 1.2em. I've seen some eBooks used a 5% and even a 7% setting for indents.
The problem is that a lot of people who make eBooks do stupid stuff and we have to go in to fix it. And these are people who work for the big publishers. If we could get them to make eBooks correctly then we would not have to go in and fix them as much as we do. Correctly is to keep it simple which they don't do in most cases.