[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

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.

I use StarOffice to generate my PDFs, and haven't worried too much about my widow-orphan setting causing a large gap at the bottom of the page, my only concern is to avoid having the first or last line of a paragraph on a page by itself (I've set StarOffice to bump any paragraph of four or less lines to the next page). Two or three blank lines at the bottom of a page hasn't been an issue for me.

Compared to others I use a fairly large base font size for my ebooks (14 points) for easier reading. Since I prefer a ragged-right margin, like with the widow-orphan setting mentioned above, the blank space at the end of a line hasn't been an issue. I find fixed spacing easier to read than justified spacing.

Although the above formatting isn't what you usually see in professional printed books, it's easier for me to read. Since page count isn't much of an issue with ebooks, it gives me flexibility to format my ebooks in a way that I want.