Word wrap in the forum [closed]

[Madam Broshkina]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why can't you just set your browser so YOU get the tiny lines and we get what we want? How hard is that or maybe it's too hard. I am not sure.

I have no problem with the way bowerbird posts. Just because you do not like something does not give you the right to speak for the rest of us. You should edit your post to say: "Why can't you just set your browser so YOU can get the tiny lines and I get what I want.

[JSWolf]

The forum is setup so when a properly typed message is posted, they get to have things they way they want. When you put in hard returns in places they don't belong, you take away the power of the forum to give people what they want. You basically FORCE everyone to purt up with things the way YOU want, not the way they may want. If they want small lines, narrow the browser window. If they want long lines, widen the browser window. It's not hard to do it so everyone benefits.

Look at post #12 in this thread. You'll notice the quoted text is NOT quoted the way the ORIGINAL POSTER posted it. It's modified to have smaller lines. It's been modified from the way that the OP posted.

[mogui]

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[igorsk]

XXX Streams?

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by igorsk

XXX Streams?

No. eXXX Streams. It's the digital form.

[mogui]

eLiptical humor

[bowerbird]

jon, it seems you and i disagree about what "self-expression" means.

which, i guess, is entirely appropriate, isn't it? :+)

-bowerbird

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

jon, it seems you and i disagree about what "self-expression" means.

which, i guess, is entirely appropriate, isn't it? :+)

-bowerbird

Yes we do disagree. But as we know, ebooks should be about reflowable text in such a way that it gives the user the experience s/he wants. The way you are typing, itf you were an ebook, you'd be sitting on some website not being purchased as your reading experience is like a poorly formatted PDF. Imagine you took your computer screen and pushed everything over to take up no more then 1/3rd of the left side. Would you really enjoy using your computer when 2/3rds on the right blank? That's basically what you are doing when you self-express. You also take what others type and reformat it fit your 1/3rd of the screen. It's not nice and a lot of people don't enjoy reading it. if they decide they want it narrow they can set the theme to liquid and adjust the browser.

[bowerbird]

jswolf said:
> But as we know, ebooks should be about reflowable text
> in such a way that it gives the user the experience s/he wants.

yeah, you know, i've agreed with that perspective for decades.

and yet, in the last 15 years, the one format that caught on
-- stole the whole show, basically -- was frozen-page .pdf...

and according to every multi-format web-library i know,
it's _still_ the runaway leader in downloads. go figure...
i guess i wasn't quite as smart as i once thought i was...

> Would you really enjoy using your computer
> when 2/3rds on the right blank?

i have a 23-inch cinema-screen, so i often work in
windows 1/3 the size of this baby. so maybe i'm the
wrong person for you to be asking that question to...

if you want my posts to fill the width of your screen,
however, then you could just jack the text-size up...
i can even make it fill the width of my 23-inch screen:



but, yeah, one thing i've noticed is more and more sites
insist on limiting the column-width of the user-experience.

blogs default to put the main content in a center column
-- which generally takes up roughly _half_ of the screen --
and relegate sidebar stuff to the left and right columns.

i think they do this because browsing at full-screen width
makes lines much too long to be easily readable. at least
that's why i _assume_ they're doing it. but like i just said,
i'm not quite as smart as i once thought i was about this,
so maybe you should ask them why they're doing it...

you can start with david rothman, over at the teleread blog.
up until just recently, he had a very narrow center column.
and it was set at a fixed specified size, so even when i would
widen my window to the full 23 inches, the center column
still stayed at that puny width. for such a champion of the
"power" of the xhtml/css combo, it was funny and ironic.
he's got a new design now that turned me off even more,
so i haven't browsed there much lately, i read it in r.s.s.,
so i can't really tell you what the current problems are...
but hey, here's a screenshot to show you what it looks like
here on _my_ monitor:



and then there's that khoi guy, who is considered one of the
best web-designers, which is why the n.y. times hired him.
he likes grids, and some columns on his personal website
are so narrow that even my _smallest_ lines spill over...
here's what his site -- subtraction.com -- looks like for me:



or john gruber. again, narrow center column, with whitespace
(or should i say "grayspace"?) at left and right. wasted space,
in my personal opinion, but hey, whatsa person gonna do?
and gruber is reputed to have some great design chops too.
i think i remember he said it took him _6_months_ to make
the final decision on the _exact_ color of his gray background.
so now we know why the designers get the big bucks, eh?



and don't forget the mecca of c.s.s., the c.s.s. zen garden.

i entertain myself frequently there by zooming the text up to
a really _huge_ pointsize -- i'm talking like 64 points and up --
to see how it breaks all those nicely-crafted designs to pieces.
not that you have to go so big to break the designs, mind you.
on many designs, if you size up the text _one_measly _notch_,
the design breaks. and _two_notches_ usually breaks it badly.

plus gee, now we have the small screens like the iphone,
actually displaying websites "the way they were intended"
-- as opposed to the "make-it-narrow" approach of opera --
so we have to include _that_ in the picture as well...

it's complicated, i tell you. i used to think it was _easy_,
and _reflow_ was the solution that solved all the problems.
but now i can see that even a ruthless reflow-minded
approach like the xhtml/css combo can't handle everything.

so now it's just plain hard to say...

-bowerbird

p.s. somehow, however, i don't think that you intended
to bring up a general theoretical question about reflowing,
did you? so let me give you a tip that you might like.
this edit-field here, where people enter and edit posts?
it's very narrow. if you were to make it _a_lot_wider_,
then you would probably find that my lines got longer...
i'm not the boss of you, and i'm not telling you what to do,
i'm just sayin'...

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

and yet, in the last 15 years, the one format that caught on
-- stole the whole show, basically -- was frozen-page .pdf...

and according to every multi-format web-library i know,
it's _still_ the runaway leader in downloads. go figure...

That's a good point. I've always been of the mind that PDF got such a large following because the PDF reader software was given away, so everyone had it, and there really wasn't anything else that approached its ubiquity. But I don't believe its popularity was in any way due to it ever being considered suited for use as an e-book format -- I don't think that was ever even considered, really.

PDFs inflexibility really makes it ill suited for e-books: it's designed to preserve format, and it does that very well, to the detriment of readability in many cases.

That's one of reasons I've been cautiously optimistic about epub and Digital Editions. It's got Adobe's name recognition, but it's a flexible format rather than a fixed one, making it much more appropriate for e-books, in my opinion.

[JSWolf]

Blogs are narrow because of all the stuff on the right side they have due to the format of most blogs. But yeah, I do see your pont on how there are lots of things that are made with narrow columns. Teleread is a fixed size. My screen is a 19" non-wide LCD monitor at 1600x1200 and it would be nice it it was reflowable based my nmy browser window size.

[jbenny]

The problem with a lot of sites (not just TeleRead) is that they use canned software like WordPress. This makes it a lot easier for non-techies to publish on the web. It also puts them at the mercy of what templates are available for their particular software.

It's a tradeoff. For myself, I'd probably either create a better template to use in the CMS (content management software), or I'd just do the entire site by hand. This is not an option for the majority of people and web sites, however.

Edit: There are situations where it is appropriate to limit the amount of text on a line for stylistic presentation on a web site. I don't agree with doing this in forums, emails, etc., but that is just my preference.

[bowerbird]

natch said:
> I've always been of the mind that PDF got such a large following because
> the PDF reader software was given away, so everyone had it,
> and there really wasn't anything else that approached its ubiquity.

i've always been of the mind that .pdf got such a large following because
adobe is a ruthless company that does not let competitors get a toehold,
and -- if they do -- will buy 'em out or find another way to destroy them.

but maybe that's just me... ;+)

-bowerbird

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by bowerbird

i've always been of the mind that .pdf got such a large following because
adobe is a ruthless company that does not let competitors get a toehold,
and -- if they do -- will buy 'em out or find another way to destroy them.

Well, sure, that too.

But it mounts to the same sum, doesn't it? PDF's popularity for books has little to do with the format's being a good choice for e-books.

[bowerbird]

natch said:
> But it mounts to the same sum, doesn't it?
> PDF's popularity for books has little to do with
> the format's being a good choice for e-books.

the _current_ popularity of .pdf put aside for a moment,
its effectiveness as a vehicle for e-books is two-pronged.

in a resizable-window world, .pdf _stinks_, unredeemably.
while it's only fair to note it wasn't made for that purpose,
it's also important to recognize that's the world we live in.

however, as we've seen, even the methodologies that are
_specifically_geared_ for a reflowable world often fail us,
and certainly don't work nearly as well as we would _like_.

so we have to look at the other prong too.

in a fixed-size-window world, .pdf is relatively worthwhile.
it offers a decent array of the functionalities that we need,
and missing ones (e.g., remixability) are not a priority yet.
its performance, though not snappy, isn't unbearably slow.
it doesn't add _too_ much bloat to a document. you _can_
rely on an assumption that readers will be familiar with it,
and already have on their machines a program to view it...

maybe the best part of all? .pdf is _very_ easy to generate.
(and _this_, i would posit, is a big reason for its popularity.)

i believe it was pioneered by another company, not adobe,
but whoever did it, the printer-driver approach is _genius_.

it is also a very terrible _curse_, as it allows a person to
create an "e-book" designed for paper, not for the screen.
but some blame needs to be put squarely on that person.
i have long advocated that .pdf creation software do this:

you're attempting to create an 8.5*11-inch .pdf.
because this size won't fit at 100% on their monitor,
almost everyone will have to shrink it, meaning that
your already-too-small 10-point type will be 7-point,
and be totally unreadable. because such documents
reflect poorly on the reputation of adobe .pdf format,
we simply cannot let you create this .pdf until you've
changed the parameters to make it work on-screen.
we're sure you understand, because you are familiar
from your _own_ experience at how _frustrating_ it is
when you attempt to read such a poorly-designed .pdf.

so we thank you for your cooperation in this matter...

here are some possible fixes. check all you'd like to apply:
o -- make the page-size smaller.
o -- make all of the type bigger.
o -- change from portrait orientation to landscape.
o -- run a wizard to make it work; i'll review the changes.

again, thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

there's another thing to consider too.

the simplicity of creating .pdf _could_ be a valuable tool
as a solution to .pdf's biggest flaw of nonreflowability.

i'm concentrating here on the fact that, though we live
in a reflowable world, based on our many screensizes,
there are lots of machines that have fixed-size screens,
range from the pda's to the sonyreader to the iliad, etc.

and even on those machines, like our computers, which
have screens big enough to support resizeable windows,
people often settle on one specific size for their reading.
and as long as a .pdf is sized appropriately, it works fine.

that's what enables mobileread to have a library, right?
the fact that there's some agreement about the variables
that need to be set to make a .pdf work on a sonyreader,
or an iliad, or a cybook, or whatever...

so, suppose we distributed an e-book in a "raw" form,
along with a conversion utility that allowed end-users
to create a .pdf to their own specifications simply by
dropping the raw e-book on the converter-utility.

so if they wanted the e-book formatted for sonyreader,
they'd just drop it on the converter, click a button, and
*boom*, there was a .pdf, at the right size, and using
their favorite fonts, typesize, header-style, and so on...

and if, tomorrow, they wanted it formatted for an iliad,
just drop it on the converter, and *boom*, there it was,
again customized to all of their personal settings...

to my mind, that might well be a _viable_ environment...
not as good as complete and instant reflow in the viewer.
but not nearly as cripped as a fixed-format unable to reflow.

-bowerbird