Quote:
Originally Posted by Abecedary
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.
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All you need to have all those features is some $800 to plonk down for an Abobe Indesign license an a few select professional fonts from Linotype - like PMN Caecilia - that come at $30 a pop. You are not going to use Microsoft Comic Sans to create a typographically perfect book. Are you?
EDIT: There is another font that might be great for a display with limited resolution - Droid. It can be downloaded legally, search the forum
Then you would have to rip the pdf into series of bitmaps with exact resolution that represents the *visible* space on the reader. This ripping would be necessary, because the antialiasing algorithm used for pdf files leaves big room for improvements. Then you use those ripped bitmaps to create The Perfect Document for your reader.
Ever since I got my Reader I was planning to find out what is an actual resolution of visible screen space. The only way to do that is to create a set of white - black pixels and see what number of pixels does not produce moire. It means creating 550 black/white pixels, then 551, 552, all the way to 600.
Another way to create perfect document without purchasing Adobe in-design would be to use LaTeX. Learning LaTeX has been high on my ToDo list for ages as well. ;-)
I wonder if local LaTeX gurus have a good template they could provide for us - almost total LaTeX ignorants?
In the meanwhile I will continue to use rtf documents using PRS-500 built-in sanserif font at 16 point size, left justification.
There are several reasons:
- formatting of the book only takes a few minutes
- the built-in sanserif font is extremely well hinted and is very well suited for a very low resolution medium. And 166dpi IS an extremely low resolution from typographical point of view