Quote:
Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern
This is an old, old problem. Anyone who is knowledgeable or a professional in graphic design and typography please chime in.[SNIP some discussion of ligatures]
With advanced ligature capabilities, the "fi" becomes a glyph (see image, top left)which I obviously cannot show you textually because this feature is not available in this forum nor is it available generally on the web. So, I demonstrate again with the graphic below. Notice how in proper ligature format, the "dot" of the "i" has disappeared. In fact, it no longer exists! The hook of the "f" takes over the space that originally would have been inhabited by the "dot" of the "i".
[SNIP more discussion of ligatures]
Now, this only touches the surface of typographical problems. There are many problems of which mentioned previously by someone else was kerning. Automatic kerning still isn't good enough to be used totally professionally. If you want a properly kerned text, you really still need to do it by eyesight.
And the problem goes on and on and on. If a piece of text was properly ligature, kerned and so forth and you printed it in PDF, the PDF will be able to properly reproduce (faithfully reproduce) the text in any display for any computer or digital device.
Sure, PDF can be improved upon. Right now, it's what I stick to though because I find the other formats unsatisfying. And to my eye (even if not a professional typographer's or typesetter's eye) the other formats really is glaringly ugly in producing text.
My eyes bleed when I see that ;-)
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Edit: by the way, I should say that I still find kerning very difficult to know how to do well. When I try to produce something aesthetically pleasing, I like most people rely on automatic kerning because I find it very difficult to make it nice looking. When I can see some areas where automatic kerning is not working properly I do try to adjust it manually but a lot of the times I can't get the spacing correctly. Knowing how to kern aesthetically is really difficult. It takes a lot of training and experience.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
While that's an interesting point, what you describe should be *purely* a presentation-layer issue. The "f" and the "i" should be unchanged in the data stream. The reader will have to parse that and determine if it needs to do anything special fontwise or not. Relying on the composer of the data to "suggest" a different piece of data to be displayed at that location seems to me to be bad practice.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
From what I read he's saying, he's saying here, I've got some data with the letters "fi" next to each-other in it. Now, because *I* think you're a human reader, and *I* think your fonts probably can't handle that, *I* am going to *change* that data to some strange glyph. But it's okay, because I'm relying on you to have *my* special software to re-render that glyph back into something human readable. But if you don't, your font may come up with something totally not readable. In any case, the original data is *gone* or hidden. This makes the data inscrutable to many devices unless they special case for such a glyph.
Now, it perfectly makes sense for a specialized reader software, if it suspects a font problem, to make this substition at the display level. It makes very little sense for the *composer* software to do so, changing the data before it's written into a certain format. Even if the format didn't change the data but merely provided some suggestion of an alternative data set, I would be hesitant to say that's a good idea; not only does it cause data bloat, but could easily lead to more trouble trying to parse and display your idiosyncratic format.
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thibaulthalpern is quite correct in his discussion of typographical issues. And the later posters I've quoted are equally correct that this should be a
presentation-layer issue rather than a change that is made in the underlying document format.
And it
IS a presentation-layer issue in any piece of modern Mac software that didn't come from Microsoft. The standard OS text utilities include so-called "advanced typography support," which includes automatic ligatures and some auto-kerning support. The ligature support is really slick and entirely transparent to the underlying application code. The kerning support is also transparent for the underlying application, but is not (yet) anywhere near as good as carefully performed hand-optimized kerning done by an expert. But it is better than my layperson's novice-quality efforts.
It seems to me that you folks are having an unnecessary argument. The problem is not that PDF is useless, nor is it that ePub (for example) can't
ever do a good enough job of presentation.
Rather, the problem is that PDF is really centered around a fix-size page. And that makes it
significantly less usefull when the screen of your viewing device is significantly different from the intended page size. Similarly, the issues with ePub come (mostly) from limitations in the display software, not from limitations in the format itself.
So PDF loses when I have a 6"-diagonal screen and your beautifully-layed-out document is optimized for a 13.9" screen! But ePub (today) doesn't even come close to the level of the best hand-optimized layouts for any particular size. And, in some abstract sense, what we really want is the best of both!
But with today's technology an ePub is usable on many screen sizes, where a PDF usually isn't.
Xenophon