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Originally Posted by charleski
If you want adornments, then I think zelda's "Three Men in a Boat" or pdurrant's "Desbarollda, The Waltzing Mouse" show the large extent of what can be done using current ereader technology. But the fact is that I can open any of my large collection of paper books at a random page and there's a 99% chance that all I'll see will be monochrome text.
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I make my own PDFs and am pretty familiar with what little can be done with ebook readers. It's a pretty sad state of affairs, but at least with PDF, quality is not completely sacrificed. I had Zelda's Three Men in a Boat and couldn't finish it until I downloaded the text and made my own PDF from it.
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There's a market for colour in books, but it's limited. Low-resolution colour is used in some technical works and is important in children's books, but that's it. High-resolution colour for images would be nice, but we're not going to get that on an ereader any time soon, all the coming colour displays will be limited to the same sub-newsprint resolutions used on the web.
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Color is actually pretty big. Sorry you don't see it. Frankly, for the novel reading and stuff, I agree that black and white is sufficient. Hopefully someone out there will make a good black and white screen in the future.
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Sub-pixel rendering techniques such as ClearType work best on specifically-designed fonts in order to avoid the colour-fringing problems that can be seen at small point sizes. When using fonts that aren't tuned and hinted for ClearType an increased contrast can sometimes make things worse. Increasing the overall contrast helps only up to a point, as the real problem is the limited resolution that all displays suffer.
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Yes, they work best with specially designed fonts. Luckily, there are quite a few of them out there. Even in Chinese, there are a few that are designed to work with ClearType. Of course, none of them work well on e-ink, looking washed out and weak due to the anti-aliasing dropping the black in favor of a midrange gray. The ones that DON'T play well with ClearType also fail on e-ink, while anti-aliasing can be tweaked, changed to another renderer or disabled altogether on a PC. No such choice exists for ebook reader devices. Even when generic anti-aliasing is used, I can read just about any font at a significantly smaller size on a high contrast LCD.
It'll be nice when they can push linear resolutions approaching crappy print, and won't need all this artificial font smoothing nonsense. Many Chinese devices toss out anti-aliasing altogether as pixelated text is far easier to read than blurred and washed out text. Too bad they don't do that with ebook readers (or give users the option of doing it)