Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
What I don't understand in this whole argument is the comparison to the real world and the digital. I don't read newspapers or magazines in print, haven't for a long time, the web versions are suited to a different medium and I wouldn't want them trying to replicate the physical medium. What works in the physical world, especially design wise, cannot be rammed into the digital where 're-flow' and 'fluidity' are the cornerstones of the design ethic. Websites, as with ePub have to degrade and upgrade gracefully. PDF cannot do this, and I don't see a point in the future where this function (the most important for one-file-many-viewers) will be replicated.
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For me, the problem is most that most of commercial e-books I have seen try to reproduce the look of printed page. Including:
- ridiculously wide margins - up to 15mm
- use of serif font - the low resolution displays work much getter with a heavily hinted sanserif
- full justification with too few words on page - that combined with the lack of hyphenation leads to wildly varying width of space between words
Each of us has a different taste. I simply fail to understand why can't things like:
- font
- font size
- line space
- space between paragraphs and first line indent
- margins
- page numbers placement (or lack of)
- JUSTIFICATION
be user configurable and overridable.
If you like the book as it was laid out (or slapped together), fine. But if you do not like it, why should you suffer just because the book happens to be DRM crippled?
In modern browsers you have one central css file that can override anything on page or in original css files. This way you can force browser to do various interesting things with content (including filtering of advertisments).
Why can't an e-pub viewer have one file UserContent.css that would override anything that is in css file inside epub file. This way Ahi could switch off that annoying page numbers, while scholars that need to refer to the original page numbers could keep the numbers visible. I could make all my books left justified, because I prefer words with even spaces to aesthetically pleasing text box (with very un-aesthetic rivers and wildly varying typographic gray). I could use my loved heavily hinted sanserif, while Ahi could use the fanciest font from his extensive collection of typographically perfect fonts.