Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
They correctly handle typefaces, punctuation, paragraphs, text styles.
They fail on: hyphenation, widows and orphans
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Some of them fail on important aspects of typefaces, especially in the matter of bold/italics. And I'd put low resolution leading to blurry-ish letters in the typefaces category as well, but that's a hardware issue we all know will get better in time. Not supporting proper bold & italics, and lack of font & character support, are software issues that could be fixed already.
Their orphan problems includes orphaning punctuation marks--my PRS-505 will put quotation marks in a separate line, rather than keeping them with the text they follow, when it reads RTF files.
Current ebook readers are all plenty good enough for reading *lots* of text. What they're not good enough for, is convincing most readers that an ebook is just as "real," just as much a work of craft & art, as a pbook. (Opinions of Mobileread regulars don't count. We're fanatics.) For that, they need hyphenation, justification and better font support. (And, of course, a publishing industry that pays attention to how those work in reflowable formats.)