Quote:
Originally Posted by Abelturd
On books that are available in html, e.g. on PG, I do the layout myself, I set the page size, choose my preferred font face, size and line spacing and export them as PDFs.
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That's what I do. I sometimes even do this for books available as PDF--first convert them to Word, touchup the line breaks where necessary, remove the page breaks, and reformat to a size & shape I enjoy reading.
I love PDFs for this, but I don't agree that every person should be an amateur typesetter to enjoy ebooks. And claiming "we should use publishing standards!" is disingenuous; the standards for publishing were designed for paper, not pixels; the concepts of good fonts, line spacing, and page layout were optimized over many years, based on the physical realities of paper.
Print publishing standards don't deal with font hinting, variable display sizes, screen refresh rates, or LCD vs other screen types, or embedding or postscript issues. Print standards were created with the premise that what the publisher made was exactly what the buyer would read... that a book (magazine, poster, whatever) looked the same no matter whose hands were holding it, no matter what kind of lamp was used to read it. (Items that looked different under different lamps are considered rare and exotic. I wonder if there's a market for black light children's books?)
It's not that I mind the idea of a publisher setting my viewscreen preferences... it's that so far, they keep setting them
wrong. The free Harlequin romances (epub) I downloaded have atrociously huge margins. The free PDFs from Tor... well, they mirror print; they're awful on my Reader. The Sony-sized PDFs from Feedbooks use a much larger font than I like, and while I'll tolerate that in a paper book (erm, or I used to before I gave up paper), in an ebook, that's extra battery life, extra blinky page clicks I didn't need.
I have no reason to believe that publishers are ever going to create PDFs to match reader preferences, and so I prefer reflowable, customizable formats.