Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Getting typography right is trivial and inexpensive.
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Oh... then there's no reason why ePUB readers can't get those trivial enhancements
The fact is good typography is not trivial, as you know, and it is only inexpensive because it can largely be done with free tools, but it takes time, knowledge and expertise.
Getting typography a whole lot better that it is now (for HTML renderers) would be trivial, just use proper justification and ligatures. But that does not make it "right". You have to manually check every end of sentence to make the spacing a bit wider there (in English typography), for instance, you have to manually check every hyphenation to make sure it's right, you have to manually check every pagebreak looking for widows, orphans or too much whitespace (and rivers, and stacks...), you have to check every floating figure/table, you have to be careful with undesired linebreaks (it's better not to split "Mr. Smith" if possible, for example), etc. And many of those things have to be checked again if you change the font size, or the page size.
In short, the sort of things that "can only be done with PDF" are not easy or trivial, but the things that are easy or trivial "can be implemented in ebook renderers", and that would already be a big improvement.