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Old 08-28-2009, 01:54 PM   #241
cmdahler
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cmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notescmdahler can name that song in three notes
 
Posts: 292
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Join Date: Aug 2009
Device: Sony PRS-505, iPad
Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter View Post
Yeap.
And that's the problem. You're all saying ePub is crap. Not true. Adobe's implementation of epUB is.
Depends on what the end consumer will accept. For people like me who want their readers to display text in the typeset quality of the printed page, ePub is crap and will always be crap. I couldn't reflow the books I used to read on paper, and I have no interest in doing so on my reader. Reading the latest pulp garbage by Steele or today's edition of the Times might be fine with ePub; reading a literary masterpiece such as War and Peace or Monte Cristo is an art on an entirely different level. ePub will never be a suitable format for such masterworks; that's like asking one to appreciate a Monet on a 4x6 digital frame from Walmart. If I want to read such a book in a different font size, I'll just use TeX or Indesign to resize the font and re-export the PDF.

ePub might eventually get to where it can do decent hyphenation and paragraph-level formatting. Even TeX and Indesign can't do chapter-level formatting. Right now, good typesetting still requires some manual tweaking to prevent widows and orphans while keeping a consistent baseline and avoiding a ragged page bottom. Eventually, typesetting software may get sophisticated enough to produce a final product with no manual intervention at all, but until that time comes, those of us who do want a high-quality crafted display on our readers have no option but to use a PDF that was specifically designed for a particular font size and the screen size of our readers.

If this were not something I cared about, after all, I could just as easily have stayed with reading my books on my iPhone. I wanted a better reading experience than that.
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