Quote:
Originally Posted by gregcd
Stay away from PDF's if you are looking for clear text. The resizing algorithm slightly distorts the font. If you reflow a pdf (with the zoom button on the sony) the font will be shown properly (but you will likely lose formatting). Use adobe epub's for proper display.
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Actually, custom-made PDFs (tailored for the 505's screen) are the only way you can have
real typographic control on the 505. I'm talking about hyphenation and proper justification, true italics(!), appropriate leading, actual kerning between letters (instead of the random 'smushing' that the 505 seems to like to do with certain character pairs at times), ligatures, hanging indents that actually work, no widows/orphans, no rivers, drop caps/raised caps that work (actually, raised caps are about the only thing that epub can currently handle, although half the time they're apparently
supposed to be drop caps), mixed character sets, and on and on. Of course, this all comes at the expense of having to take the care that a book designer would put into a print book. And it also comes at the expense of not being able to use the resize/reflow features of the ereaders. But if the file is custom-tailored for the screen/device, that shouldn't be much of an issue anyways.
Don't get me wrong, I love my 505 and have spent far too much time reading on it in the month that I've had it. But from a typographic perspective, ebook readers and the various ebook formats have a really long way to go. It's like Gutenberg just invented the press and we're all still marveling at having printed words on a page. A huge majority of the typographic finesse that's occurred in the past 600 years is still missing with ebooks. That's not to say that it won't eventually come. But it's a huge disservice to the art of typography to pretend that it doesn't exist. And whether many of you realize it or not, all of those things do add up and do make a considerable difference to the appearance and readability of a book.