Quote:
Originally Posted by Valloric
And by "layout" being up to the Reading Systems, I meant the actual text layout. As in the way paragraphs and lines flow and break, tracking, kerning etc. You can't control that when creating an epub book, and it's very important for physical books.
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Obviously there's a lot more to typography and book design than that, though you're right that they are a very important component. Relowability means that line- and page-breaks within a continuous block of text need to be left to the reading system, but tracking and kerning can most certainly be controlled, I've attached an example to show this (which also shows the tedious contortions needed to get around the primitive limitations of the epub spec).
Typography was one of the first industries to embrace a computersied workflow, I don't think modern typographers have any problem with that, though they might not know what to do with a composing stick. (x)Html and CSS are hardly rocket-science, anyone can pick them up very quickly. They're just a tool, like a knife - everyone knows how to use a knife to cut some bread, but very few know how to use a knife to cut out an appendix.