Yes and no. I
prefer quality typography (maybe even "strongly prefer"), but less-than-wonderful typography can be sufficient. My minimum requirements are these (roughly speaking):
- The correct characters must show everywhere in the document. This means no "square boxes" or stray "?" -- these typically indicate character encoding issues or missing glyphs in fonts or other similar issues.
- Paragraph formatting must survive well enough for paragraph breaks to be clear.
- Plain text, bold, and italic must survive in the document presentation.
- I almost forgot fixed-width "typewriter-style" formatting. This usually doesn't matter in fiction, but when it does matter, it's a big deal indeed.
- Scene breaks must display correctly. In many books, a scene-change is indicated by a larger-than-normal space between paragraphs. That space may also contain some characters (e.g. "* * *") or perhaps a fancy symbol; it might also be empty, but larger than a standard paragraph space. When scene breaks are lost, you get really odd jumps from one paragraph to the next. This drives me nuts.
- Either left-justified (w/ ragged-right) or full-justitified text... But full-justified must be well-hyphenated (at a minimum), otherwise the spacing between words varies too much for my taste. Most current readers and their firmware fail at full-justification (IMHO).
- A choice of font-family that is either (a) easily readable on the device I'm using, or (b) easily replaceable with a font-family of my choice.
Widow and orphan lines don't bother me as much, but I certainly wish for good widow-and-orphan control. Similarly, I'd love to see the end of stacks and rivers in justified text. And better (or even any) kerning support. And ligatures. And much much more. The bulleted items are the minimum required for me to put up with a book (for fiction, that is).
Xenophon
P.S. In this post I've ignored content issues, scanos and OCR issues, typos, etc., and have attempted to stick to pure typographical issues.