Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
I never saw a function in them, except to give me some room to hold the book and to give room for the binding... Very annoying when the text is hardly visible due to the binding...
|
One of the most important functions of a vertical margin is to add a visual buffer when eliminating widows and orphans. With no margins, either they are eliminated with a visually jarring gap at the bottom of the page, or they are ignored and the book becomes polluted with widows and orphans.
Your ignorance and low standards do not change this. It's a general habit in the ebook community to not only not care about quality, but to justify and prefer its absence.
In order to compensate for the lack of margin while removing widows and orphans, the two most effective techniques I can think of are to subtly shift the line spacing, or to strategically manipulate individual lines to either increase or reduce the number of lines on a page. Neither of these are particularly easy or effective with the wider orientation of the screen, as you get much more optical forgiveness when a block of text is tall. As a result, both strategies become a bit too conspicuous to be useful.
And yes I'm aware you don't care about this stuff. As far as most ebook readers are concerned, it's is just a nuisance, a snobbish conceit that only exists due to typesetters wanting validity and vindication in the old obsolete paper realm where text couldn't be reflowed to the whims of the reader.
However, there are still some people in the world who care about things like quality. My hope is that they don't become completely extinct on these fora.