Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
One of the greatest advantages of digital devices is their display flexibility... stylesheets shouldn't narrow the options, they should provide for more options. This allows users to select their reader based on its particular reading characteristics, not on whether or not a book is designed for it.
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Precicely. Publishers should be given to tools (i.e. the file format's capability) to reproduce whatever is required of the specific book, and readers should have the ability to change their device's settings to tweak the view to their specific device or needs.
A format needs to be settled on that allows complete freedom of formatting while preserving the user's ability to change font styles and size, etc. without rendering the book unreadable.
I've been disappointed with some commercial ebook formatting. Certain unicode characters don't seem to work, I've seen page breaks in the middle of chapters, etc. A proper markup format, along with care from publishers, would eliminate all these errors and leave the formatting to the device/user's preference.