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Originally Posted by Moejoe
Very much so, and it's great to hear someone in support of PDF as a format, because I'm learning it's strengths and not just its weaknesses 
Now let me ask, and it was on a point you brought up before about the 10 + years of HTML & CSS and how it hasn't been able to replicate the book or magazine. Do you not see a point in the future (when MS finally puts standards compliance into their browser) that web rendering will match PDF typography/layout etc? Do you think this is possible, or improbable? |
Let me articulate--no doubt badly and poorly--why I do not see the web ever becoming a repository filled with typographically exemplary documents. Or, rather, first let me try to give you a sense what all typography involves.
Typography has to do with...
- the specific fonts used, the number of fonts used, the "pedigree" of the fonts used (serif or sans serif, as well as the artistic/typographic lineage for lack of a better term)
- the size of the fonts used, the size of the fonts used for specific items
- the white space between elements on a page, between pages (i.e.: when to leave a blank page--interestingly the rules around this naturally change/evolve for eBooks to "almost never"), between sentences, between lines, between words, and between individual characters
- the styles/substyles of the fonts used (regular roman, oblique [slanted non-italic], italic, small capitals)... the highest quality fonts have separate glyphs ("drawn" characters) for small capital "A" and regular capital "A", separate glyphs for italics and bolds, even separate glyphs for letters to be displayed at specific pt sizes.
- the progression from one font style/substyle to the next
- the "colour" of the page (ideal being a consistent level of grayness throughout), which is impacted by spacing of every sort (as listed before) and necessarily impacted by hyphenation of words (which has its own rules that software cannot get right 100% of the time)
- the size and ratio of the margins (again reinterpreting for eBooks simplifies this one)
- and much more...
To create typographically sound documents you need software that is aware of both high level and low level details... basically you need LaTeX. HTML, without duplicating LaTeX' functionality cannot achieve that. If it did, it would still need human guidance/assistance to deal with situation not automatically resolveable by software. And, even in this highly unlikely ideal scenario, reflowing to any display size/font size combination not anticipated and (human-)addressed would result in typographic degradation.
How much sense did that make?
- Ahi