Quote:
Originally Posted by dmikov
BTW. Few centuries tradition very often means absolutely nothing. Horse cariages and sail boats come to mind.
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That's all true, but there's a difference between tradition and science. Typography is a science, not a tradition. It has basic rules that have evolved for good reasons: they increase the readability of the text. For example, long experience has taught that the ideal single line of text on a page should have approximately 66 characters. Much longer than that, and the eye has to move too much to read the text and the reader loses the natural flow of effortless reading. That's why magazines and newspapers are printed with columns. Good typography also pays attention to word spaces throughout a paragraph in an effort to avoid distinct "rivers" of vertical whitespace since that is distracting and interrupts the flow of reading. Kerning and other letter-spacing techniques are designed to provide the reader with an uninterrupted blend of characters to form a word because the eye and brain reads a word as a recognizable single unit, not as a string of characters. More recent developments in typography (over the last century) include, for example, using hanging punctuation marks to create an optical margin - in other words, by letting hyphens and commas and the serif on a capital T extend beyond the margin just slightly, it allows the greater part of the entire character to get closer to the margin, and that produces the optical illusion of having a straighter margin than if you just make everything forced to a rigid margin.
All of this is done to provide the eye with a block of text on a page that is as uniform as possible to keep the eye flowing effortlessly across the page with as few distractions as possible. These aren't just "traditions;" they're proven techniques to make reading a pleasant experience for the reader.
E-readers should strive to produce this while also adding to the experience. Pop-up text blocks, note taking, dictionaries, the ability to resize the font - these are all cool technologies. But since the e-reader is still, at its core, a device that is designed to present readable text, these new technologies should add to, not break, the rules of good typography. For example, if the reader increases the text size, a good layout engine should re-typeset the document according to the rules of typography as much as feasible - software will never be able to do that perfectly, but it ought to at least
try. Right now, ePub doesn't even try to do that, and that's a shame, because following some of the more basic rules of typography really isn't that hard to do.