[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

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.

Yeah I use InDesign as well, as it's what I used for design work, and am thus a bit more familiar with it than I am with TeX. Glad to hear there's another person out there using InDesign for ebook PDFs. Still, I dream of the day I won't feel obligated to use it to compensate for the inadequacies of ebook providers. Hell, my standards aren't even that high!

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.

I use GPP Caption for most of my current books, as it seems to retain the best reading character on EPD among all the fonts I've used. Arno Pro SmText and Chaparral Pro Caption are also winners for me. I like Minion Pro a lot more in print than I do on EPD, but perhaps I just haven't found a good setup with it that works. Other than GPP, my favorite print type is Jenson Pro, but the fine details are all mangled on EPDs.

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.

Unfortunately epub rendering on the 505 is tragic, and even in better readers, the H&J are hard on the eyes. I really hope there are some inroads made in terms of porting TeX's or InDesign's H&J rules to an epub renderer.

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.

The problem I have with larger type sizes on the smaller screen is that widow/orphan control leaves far more conspicuous gaps that can't be masked over so easily with adjusted spacing. This is one unfortunate side-effect of the 3:4 aspect ratio that irritates me. For a while I was using 10-11pt, but then switched to 8-8.5pt, then 9-9.5pt. I'm back to 9.5-10pt for body text with just under two LC alphabets per line.

Tricky stuff it is. Sometimes tricky enough to tempt me to give up on it and go back to not reading novels.