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Originally Posted by Tuna
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.
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PDF does not suffer from this on any eBook reading device that supports it. And personally I find the suggest that publishers can only give so much attention to be silly. Doesn't take a lot of effort or a lot of work, so long as the right tools and the right format is used.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuna
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.
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Fully agree.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuna
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.
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Except that LaTeX already exists and PDF is an open standard.
People just seem to be bent on reinventing worse solutions to already solved problems.
- Ahi