Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
In your professional opinion, do more people prefer justified or left justified eBooks?
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Well, I can only go by what I see and hear--which are the largely unvarnished opinions of our 5,000+ customers, over now 7K+ eBooks, and there appears to be a pretty
overwhelming demand for justification. Far larger than a 50/50% split. If we don't use it and they sideload to something like Moon+Reader, we hear about it. If we do use it, 98% of the time, they never complain but if we don't specify it, we
certainly do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156
Just to be clear, I would prefer justified ebooks if it could be done satisfactorily. As it can't, I prefer unjustified.
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Yes--but it's literally
impossible to do. There is no way, short of an infinite number of monkeys writing an infinite number of algorithms, live in little coding rooms, inside the magic device, to make that work. You can never--
never--know, how many characters will be allowed on a given line. You can't know what those characters will be, or what font size--or what orientation the line will be viewed using--portrait or landscape? You don't know if you'll have runts, or widows, or orphans. It's a
Dr. Strange-ness Multiverse of results out there. If you can't see the line, you can't kern it. You can't track a paragraph, to screw out a runt, because--you don't know it's going to be there.
About all you can do is pray a lot that you use a font with a solid kerning table and that the algorithms do the best that they can with it; that you get a device that does have hyphenation, so that you're not stuck with rivers (and before you say it, trust me, you can and
do get rivers with unjustified text in the wild, anyway, no matter how nutty that sounds), and sit back and wait. If there are problems with the book, oh, you'll hear about it.
If there aren't, then you've done your job and you can go home happy. Personally, as I mentioned previously, we do not align our texts, other than right-aligned headings and the like. We allow the buyers--the people spending the money--to choose what they want.
It is, after all,
their money.
Hitch