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Originally Posted by LDBoblo
It's hard to believe commercial products would be so amazingly lacking on such a simple issue as basic typography.
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Wow, A-M-E-N. I produce my PDFs with InDesign. TeX is a great free alternative, but I've seen InDesign on sale for as low as $99 at times.
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Arno, Garamond, Chaparral, Minion, even Jenson and Warnock all should have a few alternative optical sizes. It's a bit of a waste for EPUB or LRF I suppose, but worth checking out if you use PDF.
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I use Garamond Premier Pro for classics like
Don Quixote; it has a much more "classical" feel to it. For everything else, Minion Pro is just about the best Roman font available for pure readability and professional design.
On the ePub thing: I've played around with embedding Minion Pro in the ePub file, and that works just fine. One could just as easily embed the Medium weight and get the same contrast effect.
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I'll agree with this as well, though Semibold starts getting pretty heavy. Medium weights are relatively acceptable, and are probably the way to go if alternative optical sizes aren't available.
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One other method to force a bit higher contrast is to just go with a slightly larger point size on the font. 10 point works but isn't very optimum on a 160-dpi screen like these readers. Plus, some ligatures look much nicer at a slightly larger display size (for example, the ff ligature will have both f height sizes the same until you get up to around 11-point, where the second f height becomes noticeably higher than the first f, which is a nice effect). I've found that on a 6-inch wide screen like these readers, 10.75 point is just about ideal (for Minion Pro, at least - I use 11 point for Garamond): the font is still small enough to give the typesetting software enough wiggle room with word spacing and letter spacing so you don't get ungainly gaps, but large enough to provide a higher contrast and smoother font display.