[LDBoblo]

I've been tinkering around with the idea of setting a nice Chinese novel or set of novels for 6" readers like my PRS-505 and have been trying to figure out quite a few different things.

There are many challenges to typsetting for e-ink screens of this size. Orphans and widows are frustrating to manage if I want to set the text vertically in portrait mode, since they leave a massive blank space at the left side of the page that can't readily be compensated for due to the relatively large minimum font size. That can be partly resolved by typesetting either horizontally (not preferred) or by doing vertical in landscape mode (not preferred either), where the gap will be less obvious.

Anyway, the real beef I've got is with the typeface to use. In virtually all modern publishing, novels are printed with a Ming font. That said, I cannot get PMingLiU or Adobe Ming Light to display well at reasonable sizes (9-11pt). Heavier-weight Ming fonts are fairly high contrast, which means the horizontals remain thin but the verticals are thicker...they do not seem to play very nicely either. Contrast and resolution on e-ink is just too low for this kind of thing. FangSong and Kai fonts are a bit uncomfortable too, though readable at larger sizes like the Mings (11+ starts getting readable).

The standard solution that seems to be going is using Hei/Gothic fonts. I'm not sure I'm too keen on this idea for longer reading materials like novels. I would not use Arial or Verdana or Courier New or even Caecilia for a book, and can't really imagine myself using a Hei font for a Chinese novel.

I suspect there's nobody around that can help me resolve this, but it's worth asking anyway. What typefaces exist that would produce a decent looking page of text on an e-ink reader? Not just "I can read it..." but actually decent-looking. Perhaps a gentle Hei, like a Yuan font (see picture)?

Thanks in advance.