Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
I agree with most of what you wrote. Content *is* more important. But if the eBook reading public actually succeeds in permanently getting publishers to relax typographic standards for eBooks, it will be a definite loss... without necessarily, a proportional gain... if indeed any gain at all.
Such is my fear... albeit not a big fear, because I don't see paper book reading public as staunchly demanding quality typography either, and most publishers still go into the effort and expense to produce books that exceed the presumable minimum typographic expectations by a lot.
- Ahi
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Surely in the current situation, ebook publishers must feel that they can only give so much attention to typography and layout, because the various ebooks take much of their control away? Basic issues like fully justified text v.'s ragged right edges are arbitrarily decided by the particular firmware you're reading on. Despite being a 'fixed format', even PDF suffers from the vagaries of the particular device that is being used to render it.
Frankly though, this discussion is moot, because in over thirty pages of argument, all I've seen is people talking over each other trying to prove their particular point. It's great to see experts teasing out some of the subtleties of the issues at hand, but other than intellectual willy-waving (pardon the expression), this hardly achieves anything if all people do is re-iterate their particular world view time and time again without change. Like a dog playing the banjo, it's all very clever, but ultimately not very useful.
There's room here for a Knuth-like effort to produce a ebook composition and rendering system that focusses on producing the best possible environment for delivering an author's words to the reader in beautiful form. There's no reason for Adobe to own the entire problem space, and clearly a lot of community support and knowledge when it comes to improving the state of the art. If the right engineering lead could be tempted onto such a project from other community software, it would be possible to at least bring some of the issues discussed here under the control of the readers rather than being left to third parties who have other concerns.