Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I had to take some time and come back to it, to really take a look.
Realistically--there's nothing that can be done on that page. Without hand-tracking/kerning the text, there's naught that can be done. Look at each line and the ensuing word on the following line.
For example, first line, second paragraph--the word that would be "hyphenated" on that next line, is "life." Not a great candidate. Following line, it's "Damnation" and there aren't enough characters for it. Following line? More.
And so on. By making that font size 9, which is pretty big, there's not much that anyone could do. Even someone trying to hand-kern it would run into problems, at that font size, that line-length, etc. You've got a line-length of 32 characters, which is half the norm. That limits what you can do.
(I also note that I see zero hyphenation. Now, it's one page. I can't tell if it's hyphenated on the page before or after; but there's none there. I have seen any number of books with hyphenation turned off, and if that's the case in that particular book, not much that Enhanced Typesetting could do. As I said, I'm not seeing a lot of hyphenation opportunities there, of course, but...I did want to mention that authors DO turn off hyphenation all the time, prior to submitting their books. I can't tell you how many people have come through my shop who simply cannot abide hyphens and insist that we turn them off.)
Sure, enhanced typesetting is "better," but it's not magic. It can only do so much, and trying to make a line that short work in a justified environment, with words that don't lend themselves to being hyphenated...I'm not sure if I were faced with that paragraph and those limitations, myself, how much could be done, typographically speaking.
Hitch
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...and all of this is why I prefer left aligned (ragged right) over fully justified. Reading at that font size is a fairly normal occurrence for me at night, especially this time of year, when my eyes have been bombarded with pollen all day. There was hyphenation on other pages in that book, it's just chance that there wasn't on that one.
Before you ask what I did before e-readers, my answer is that my eyes weren't that bad when I got my first portable e-reader (a palm device, which quickly got upgraded to a Treo) Even then, I would sometimes make the font big enough so that only one or two words appeared on the (much smaller) screen. I had also started reading less, because it just wasn't as comfortable. I do wear glasses during the day if I'm reading or working on the computer, but it's just not comfortable to wear them when I'm reading in bed, so I crank up the font size.
Shari