[ahi]

Originally Posted by jbjb

You've made this assertion several times, but I've yet to see your justification for it. (Note that "not machine-solvable" != "not machine-solved yet").

/JB

Keep, reading, I guess. (Note that "not machine-solved yet" != "machine-solvable".)

- Ahi

Ps.: Or why don't I help you out...

And what I am saying, and will continue to state--what with it being the plain truth and all--is that no reflow format, particularly not one based on HTML, can do a good job with typography. Why? Because trying to do so hands part of the typographic work off to software... and typography is not a software-solvable problem.

The easiest to understand issue is hyphenation. If software cannot reliable and accurately hyphenate basically all words contained in a document, it has every chance of encountering situations where it may be able to make no typographically sound decision.

In English, ignoring the fact that there are well over a million words, which may be combined in impossible to foresee ways to produce, for all intents and purposes, infinitely more words... not to mention the possibility of foreign words being included in the text, proper names whether common or esoteric. If the software cannot figure out the correct hyphenation pattern for all the words in a given eBook, it cannot arbitrarily reflow and expect to be able to render something still professional-looking. (I suppose only reading eBooks about working class Americans, with common Christian names, going to well-known popular places, doing things everybody knows about/has done before is a good way to minimise software hyphenation problems.)

In other languages, you can easily get into a situation where a given word can mean two (or more) entirely different things and therefore also have differing correct hyphenation based on what they actually mean in the given context... context that may be difficult to impossible to determine via software due to the language's relatively free word order. Not that the idea that eBook reading software should have to know anything about the semantics of the text isn't ludicrous to begin with... because it truly is, and there are languages where without that, getting hyphenation right is literally hopeless. Unless of course you will have a human being spend more time manually pre-soft-hyphenating the entire document than it would take to typeset it to popular eBook reading device screen sizes as tagged PDFs (so they reflow to less popular eBook reading device sizes in the less than optimal way they cannot help but do).