[charleski]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Geez, the whole idea behind eBooks is that we the reader should get to choose how we format your text.

Sorry, but I can't agree with this in the slightest. Styling is used as an important tool to convey meaning. Think of a simple case in which a character is reading a letter: the text of the letter is set off in a blocked indented extract with a line-height of margin above and below it, that way it's immediately apparent what is the letter and what is the surrounding text. Or what about those cases when an author wants to use a different font to indicate speech from a special character, or wants to change any of the other attributes you mention in order to distinguish a certain passage and alter its meaning. These are just a few of the simplest examples. A book is not just a string of characters. Proper typography is an essential element that has been developed over hundreds of years and it's ridiculous to think that this should be thrown out overnight.

Base font size is the only thing that should definitely be user-controlled, simply to allow it to be adjusted for eyesight and reading distance. Within that, the different font sizes used by the book should be specified as a percentage of the base and scale accordingly so they retain their balance. Page margins and line height should be set properly in the book itself - the only reason to change them is if the book has been badly coded (which is certainly common, though things are better than they were a couple of years ago).

You're arguing that every book should look exactly the same - that would be a nightmare. The problem with ebooks is that the people coding them don't spend enough effort on getting the typography correct, and generally just throw in a set of default house styles rather than choosing to lay each book out with the individual care they deserve.

Charis is used because it supports the full range of unicode characters whereas the default font included with ADE has an extremely limited range, and thus guarantees that there won't be any non-rendered characters in the text. It's also used because it's free, and even the large publishers can't be bothered to invest in a licence to use a decent font. The use of Charis is lazy, cheap and wasteful, but by overriding the font specified in the ePub you're wrecking the work of those who do take care over laying out the book. Many readers, like the iPad and, now, the KT, now offer a quite a wide range of built-in fonts that are variants of commonly-known styles. If the print book was laid out in Sabon, then I should be able to read it in Sabon on my ereader, or in something that looks very similar.

The real solution is for publishers to start spending more effort on the typography of their ebooks. The effective solution, right now, is to strip off the DRM and fix the bad coding yourself. Efforts to do things in the ereader are just a stop-gap measure, and difficult to get right, as demonstrated by the current problem with italics and bold.