Quote:
Originally Posted by K-Thom
No they're not. THE most important to qualify as a "good" eBook format is readability. Not typography!
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Wow, that's just a pretty darn silly thing to say. You're obviously unaware of what typography is for. It's not to create pretty-looking art. You must be thinking about hand-drawn parchment pages from a monastery with gold-painted drawings in the margins. Good typography is what makes text readable, silly. Good typography is completely unnoticeable - that's the whole
point to it. If it weren't important at all, then why aren't you reading your books on your reader in a monospaced typewriter font? You may not be aware of the fact, but you
are reading text that has been typeset even when you're just reading this post: you're just not reading text that has been typeset
well. But even done as poorly as a web browser renders it, it's still better than reading monospaced 12 pt. Courier in ALL CAPS, right? And if you're going to read a book, which is obviously something in which text is the
whole point, you might as well do the typesetting as well as possible, which is
not something most of today's portable standards handle with panache. Using PDF-generated output from a well-designed typesetting engine is the only way currently to get typeset text that approaches professional quality. You're confusing reading a PDF that was generated for a 8.5x11 page on your tiny ereader (and of course that's not going to look good) with a PDF that was generated for your particular screen size from InDesign or TeX: and there the difference between even a well-crafted ePub and the PDF is going to be stark and clear. It's like going from an old TV to HD on a 52" flat panel in one step. Obviously PDF doesn't work for portability, and hopefully the HTML rendering engines in readers will eventually catch up to what InDesign and TeX can produce in a PDF. Until then, however, you won't catch me putting some crappy ePub on my reader: I'd rather spend a couple hours pouring the text into a InDesign template and outputting a very nice book, thank you very much. If you're happy reading your ePub or Mobi crap, good on ya.