The Economist's Babbage blog on making an e-book

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ballfresno

This is quite interesting to me. I spend so much time trying to get my students to stop doing exactly this when writing technical articles. I have them use LaTeX which allows them to concentrate on the content and not the formatting. Journals will provide the style files which will format their articles for them to the journal standards.

But boy is it difficult to get the students to stop trying to control everything!

Well, they are in line with just about the entire web industry.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Marcy

This seems to be their major problem. They were trying to control every aspect of the presentation and you just can't do that with an epub. One of my favorite things about ereading is that *I* control the look and can set the font, font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, etc. based on my preferences.

When e-publishing you need to accept that the reader can change these things instead of obsessing over ever detail of how the book will look.

Internet website designers started out the same, 15-20 years ago. The designers wanted to control the entire presentation, but since 2005-2006 or so, most have stopped trying to do that.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Internet website designers started out the same, 15-20 years ago. The designers wanted to control the entire presentation, but since 2005-2006 or so, most have stopped trying to do that.

They seem to be doing it a lot more lately. I always have my web browsers set to desktop mode, but more and more I am finding sites on my tablet that won't let me zoom in. Chrome has a setting to force zoom, but since 4.4 Chrome won't do text reflow so I don't like to use Chrome anymore.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Internet website designers started out the same, 15-20 years ago. The designers wanted to control the entire presentation, but since 2005-2006 or so, most have stopped trying to do that.

Almost every web page from large organizations, and many small ones, looks like a photograph of a brochure.

Most of the rest have frames that can't be re-sized or do not re-flow when re-sized.

I am constantly frustrated be either being unable to narrow a page so that I see other windows, or unable to take efficient advantage of a large monitor.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

They seem to be doing it a lot more lately. I always have my web browsers set to desktop mode, but more and more I am finding sites on my tablet that won't let me zoom in. Chrome has a setting to force zoom, but since 4.4 Chrome won't do text reflow so I don't like to use Chrome anymore.

Try Opera... If you can stand the crashes and hangs.

All current browsers on Android are crap, TBH.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Try Opera... If you can stand the crashes and hangs.

All current browsers on Android are crap, TBH.

I use Opera, Chrome, and Dolphin. Dolphin is the only one that can do flash now and is the only one that you can have start with the page already zoomed in. I used to use Boat for tablet after it was finally fixed, but it can't do text reflow either now. I can't believe Google screwed the text reflow up for mobile devices.

[Barty]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

I use Opera, Chrome, and Dolphin. Dolphin is the only one that can do flash now and is the only one that you can have start with the page already zoomed in. I used to use Boat for tablet after it was finally fixed, but it can't do text reflow either now. I can't believe Google screwed the text reflow up for mobile devices.

One of the features I take for granted in iOS is in any WebKit based browser, you can double tap an area of text and it automagically zooms to fit the paragraph to the viewing window. This is pretty much a must have on a mobile device and makes it unnecessary to use the mobile version of websites (which are often crappy). Amazingly, this does not work in android. Must be a patent issue?

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Barty

One of the features I take for granted in iOS is in any WebKit based browser, you can double tap an area of text and it automagically zooms to fit the paragraph to the viewing window. This is pretty much a must have on a mobile device and makes it unnecessary to use the mobile version of websites (which are often crappy). Amazingly, this does not work in android. Must be a patent issue?

It worked until KitKat and it still works in Opera and Dolphin browsers. I searched but couldn't find any reason why Google took this away and it appears that they removed it on purpose. You're right, it's essential on a mobile device. I've rarely used the Chrome browser and from what I found, text reflow never worked in Chrome. Does it work in Chrome for ios?

[jandrew]

Originally Posted by Barty

One of the features I take for granted in iOS is in any WebKit based browser, you can double tap an area of text and it automagically zooms to fit the paragraph to the viewing window. This is pretty much a must have on a mobile device and makes it unnecessary to use the mobile version of websites (which are often crappy). Amazingly, this does not work in android. Must be a patent issue?

Odd, I too take that for granted on all the browsers on my android tablet (4.2.2) If all that is broken in future android revisions, then I am happy to stay with what I've got.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by jandrew

Odd, I too take that for granted on all the browsers on my android tablet (4.2.2) If all that is broken in future android revisions, then I am happy to stay with what I've got.

It started with 4.4 and doesn't affect all browsers. Dolphin and Opera still work. I put off upgrading for a few months because of this.

[ballfresno]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

It started with 4.4 and doesn't affect all browsers. Dolphin and Opera still work. I put off upgrading for a few months because of this.

Auto-zoom in Firefox also works just fine on KitKat on a Nexus 4.

[Barty]

Originally Posted by jandrew

Odd, I too take that for granted on all the browsers on my android tablet (4.2.2) If all that is broken in future android revisions, then I am happy to stay with what I've got.

Yeah, I've only had kitkat. I wasn't aware this was something that was taken away.

Another thing they broke with kit kat is the white text on black background accessibility feature in the AOSP browser. It no longer does anything.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Barty

Another thing they broke with kit kat is the white text on black background accessibility feature in the AOSP browser. It no longer does anything.

Poor quality control, just like often happens with ebooks.

If there's one rule I follow when writing software or changing the installation on a computer, then it is this one: "DON'T break existing and working stuff, ever. People could be depending on it."