Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
Yikes! Your eyes are way better than mine - I think even 10pt Minion is a bit dense. I'm looking forward to trying the iPad or some other reader with a larger screen, like iRex's 800 or Skiff (so far, I think Skiff would be just perfect for me, if they would ever get it out the door). The larger screen would mean 11pt or even 12pt would have a very nice 66-character average per line, which seems to be optimal for the paragraph composer InDesign uses. I can't even imagine trying to read a novel at 8pt! I certainly agree that 11pt and above on the 6 inch screen results in some uncomfortable word spacing at times, but it's mostly something I can live with. I have my body text paragraph style Justification tab set at 80%, 100%, 120% for word spacing and -1%, 0%, 0% for the character spacing. That -1% seems to work well to fix a lot of the lines where the word spacing would be pretty large otherwise. It seems to me that I really start noticing the limitations of 160dpi when I get below about 10.5pt.
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When I said spacing, I actually meant leading. Many good paperbacks are printed with around 50cpl (sometimes less) and can manage word spacing and hyphenation admirably. In fact, with most of the typefaces I used, I noticed that word spacing inconsistencies were significantly more obvious at 8.5pt than with 10pt, and it was easier to minimize hyphenation at the larger size as well.
The problem comes at the bottom of the page when set to eliminate widows and orphans. A 1-2 line gap and ragged bottom works fine if you have a big enough bottom margin to conceal it, but without that margin, there's a very jarring effect to the extra space. With smaller typefaces, you can adjust the leading a little bit here or there and keep the top and bottom of the pages relatively uniform. With larger fonts, it's not so easy to conceal that gap at the bottom of some pages. If the screen's aspect ratio were closer to 9:16, a line gap at the bottom would be a much smaller proportion of visible white space, and would also permit more lines of text (and thus enhance the effect of tiny leading adjustments), but with 3:4, it's quite hard to correct. Of course, I'm not a master typographer, so perhaps I'm just ignorant of a good method to resolve the issue.