PRS-600 Simple way to improve "contrast" on the 600, 900, & maybe the 700

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

It's hard to believe commercial products would be so amazingly lacking on such a simple issue as basic typography.

Wow, A-M-E-N. I produce my PDFs with InDesign. TeX is a great free alternative, but I've seen InDesign on sale for as low as $99 at times.

Arno, Garamond, Chaparral, Minion, even Jenson and Warnock all should have a few alternative optical sizes. It's a bit of a waste for EPUB or LRF I suppose, but worth checking out if you use PDF.

I use Garamond Premier Pro for classics like Don Quixote; it has a much more "classical" feel to it. For everything else, Minion Pro is just about the best Roman font available for pure readability and professional design.

On the ePub thing: I've played around with embedding Minion Pro in the ePub file, and that works just fine. One could just as easily embed the Medium weight and get the same contrast effect.

I'll agree with this as well, though Semibold starts getting pretty heavy. Medium weights are relatively acceptable, and are probably the way to go if alternative optical sizes aren't available.

One other method to force a bit higher contrast is to just go with a slightly larger point size on the font. 10 point works but isn't very optimum on a 160-dpi screen like these readers. Plus, some ligatures look much nicer at a slightly larger display size (for example, the ff ligature will have both f height sizes the same until you get up to around 11-point, where the second f height becomes noticeably higher than the first f, which is a nice effect). I've found that on a 6-inch wide screen like these readers, 10.75 point is just about ideal (for Minion Pro, at least - I use 11 point for Garamond): the font is still small enough to give the typesetting software enough wiggle room with word spacing and letter spacing so you don't get ungainly gaps, but large enough to provide a higher contrast and smoother font display.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Wow, A-M-E-N. I produce my PDFs with InDesign. TeX is a great free alternative, but I've seen InDesign on sale for as low as $99 at times.

Yeah I use InDesign as well, as it's what I used for design work, and am thus a bit more familiar with it than I am with TeX. Glad to hear there's another person out there using InDesign for ebook PDFs. Still, I dream of the day I won't feel obligated to use it to compensate for the inadequacies of ebook providers. Hell, my standards aren't even that high!

I use Garamond Premier Pro for classics like Don Quixote; it has a much more "classical" feel to it. For everything else, Minion Pro is just about the best Roman font available for pure readability and professional design.

I use GPP Caption for most of my current books, as it seems to retain the best reading character on EPD among all the fonts I've used. Arno Pro SmText and Chaparral Pro Caption are also winners for me. I like Minion Pro a lot more in print than I do on EPD, but perhaps I just haven't found a good setup with it that works. Other than GPP, my favorite print type is Jenson Pro, but the fine details are all mangled on EPDs.

On the ePub thing: I've played around with embedding Minion Pro in the ePub file, and that works just fine. One could just as easily embed the Medium weight and get the same contrast effect.

Unfortunately epub rendering on the 505 is tragic, and even in better readers, the H&J are hard on the eyes. I really hope there are some inroads made in terms of porting TeX's or InDesign's H&J rules to an epub renderer.

One other method to force a bit higher contrast is to just go with a slightly larger point size on the font. 10 point works but isn't very optimum on a 160-dpi screen like these readers. Plus, some ligatures look much nicer at a slightly larger display size (for example, the ff ligature will have both f height sizes the same until you get up to around 11-point, where the second f height becomes noticeably higher than the first f, which is a nice effect). I've found that on a 6-inch wide screen like these readers, 10.75 point is just about ideal (for Minion Pro, at least - I use 11 point for Garamond): the font is still small enough to give the typesetting software enough wiggle room with word spacing and letter spacing so you don't get ungainly gaps, but large enough to provide a higher contrast and smoother font display.

The problem I have with larger type sizes on the smaller screen is that widow/orphan control leaves far more conspicuous gaps that can't be masked over so easily with adjusted spacing. This is one unfortunate side-effect of the 3:4 aspect ratio that irritates me. For a while I was using 10-11pt, but then switched to 8-8.5pt, then 9-9.5pt. I'm back to 9.5-10pt for body text with just under two LC alphabets per line.

Tricky stuff it is. Sometimes tricky enough to tempt me to give up on it and go back to not reading novels.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

The problem I have with larger type sizes on the smaller screen is that widow/orphan control leaves far more conspicuous gaps that can't be masked over so easily with adjusted spacing. This is one unfortunate side-effect of the 3:4 aspect ratio that irritates me. For a while I was using 10-11pt, but then switched to 8-8.5pt, then 9-9.5pt. I'm back to 9.5-10pt for body text with just under two LC alphabets per line.

Yikes! Your eyes are way better than mine - I think even 10pt Minion is a bit dense. I'm looking forward to trying the iPad or some other reader with a larger screen, like iRex's 800 or Skiff (so far, I think Skiff would be just perfect for me, if they would ever get it out the door). The larger screen would mean 11pt or even 12pt would have a very nice 66-character average per line, which seems to be optimal for the paragraph composer InDesign uses. I can't even imagine trying to read a novel at 8pt! I certainly agree that 11pt and above on the 6 inch screen results in some uncomfortable word spacing at times, but it's mostly something I can live with. I have my body text paragraph style Justification tab set at 80%, 100%, 120% for word spacing and -1%, 0%, 0% for the character spacing. That -1% seems to work well to fix a lot of the lines where the word spacing would be pretty large otherwise. It seems to me that I really start noticing the limitations of 160dpi when I get below about 10.5pt.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Yikes! Your eyes are way better than mine - I think even 10pt Minion is a bit dense. I'm looking forward to trying the iPad or some other reader with a larger screen, like iRex's 800 or Skiff (so far, I think Skiff would be just perfect for me, if they would ever get it out the door). The larger screen would mean 11pt or even 12pt would have a very nice 66-character average per line, which seems to be optimal for the paragraph composer InDesign uses. I can't even imagine trying to read a novel at 8pt! I certainly agree that 11pt and above on the 6 inch screen results in some uncomfortable word spacing at times, but it's mostly something I can live with. I have my body text paragraph style Justification tab set at 80%, 100%, 120% for word spacing and -1%, 0%, 0% for the character spacing. That -1% seems to work well to fix a lot of the lines where the word spacing would be pretty large otherwise. It seems to me that I really start noticing the limitations of 160dpi when I get below about 10.5pt.

When I said spacing, I actually meant leading. Many good paperbacks are printed with around 50cpl (sometimes less) and can manage word spacing and hyphenation admirably. In fact, with most of the typefaces I used, I noticed that word spacing inconsistencies were significantly more obvious at 8.5pt than with 10pt, and it was easier to minimize hyphenation at the larger size as well.

The problem comes at the bottom of the page when set to eliminate widows and orphans. A 1-2 line gap and ragged bottom works fine if you have a big enough bottom margin to conceal it, but without that margin, there's a very jarring effect to the extra space. With smaller typefaces, you can adjust the leading a little bit here or there and keep the top and bottom of the pages relatively uniform. With larger fonts, it's not so easy to conceal that gap at the bottom of some pages. If the screen's aspect ratio were closer to 9:16, a line gap at the bottom would be a much smaller proportion of visible white space, and would also permit more lines of text (and thus enhance the effect of tiny leading adjustments), but with 3:4, it's quite hard to correct. Of course, I'm not a master typographer, so perhaps I'm just ignorant of a good method to resolve the issue.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

When I said spacing, I actually meant leading. Many good paperbacks are printed with around 50cpl (sometimes less) and can manage word spacing and hyphenation admirably. In fact, with most of the typefaces I used, I noticed that word spacing inconsistencies were significantly more obvious at 8.5pt than with 10pt, and it was easier to minimize hyphenation at the larger size as well.

The problem comes at the bottom of the page when set to eliminate widows and orphans. A 1-2 line gap and ragged bottom works fine if you have a big enough bottom margin to conceal it, but without that margin, there's a very jarring effect to the extra space. With smaller typefaces, you can adjust the leading a little bit here or there and keep the top and bottom of the pages relatively uniform. With larger fonts, it's not so easy to conceal that gap at the bottom of some pages. If the screen's aspect ratio were closer to 9:16, a line gap at the bottom would be a much smaller proportion of visible white space, and would also permit more lines of text (and thus enhance the effect of tiny leading adjustments), but with 3:4, it's quite hard to correct. Of course, I'm not a master typographer, so perhaps I'm just ignorant of a good method to resolve the issue.

This conversation has kind of hijacked this thread, but it's interesting nonetheless. The bottom line widow/orphan issue has bothered me trememdously, too. I even spent some time experimenting with setting the page text frame to a full vertical justification, and that obviously caused endless problems with excessive line spacing on many pages and it just wasn't worth the effort. I couldn't figure out a way for InDesign to adjust the line spacing for multiple pages at once - it would only adjust line spacing on an individual page basis. Ultimately, I decided to just deal with a ragged bottom margin until InDesign or TeX can develop a true chapter-level formatting). I set InDesign to ignore orphans but avoid widows, and that minimizes the raggedness for the most part.

I don't suppose you've ever heard if Adobe has chapter-level formatting on the drawing board? I don't know if Knuth is ever planning to do that with TeX. Even just a way to have full vertical justification coupled with a chapter-level line spacing adjustment would be great. I wonder if anyone makes an after-market plug-in for that?

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

When I said spacing, I actually meant leading. Many good paperbacks are printed with around 50cpl (sometimes less) and can manage word spacing and hyphenation admirably. In fact, with most of the typefaces I used, I noticed that word spacing inconsistencies were significantly more obvious at 8.5pt than with 10pt, and it was easier to minimize hyphenation at the larger size as well.

The problem comes at the bottom of the page when set to eliminate widows and orphans. A 1-2 line gap and ragged bottom works fine if you have a big enough bottom margin to conceal it, but without that margin, there's a very jarring effect to the extra space. With smaller typefaces, you can adjust the leading a little bit here or there and keep the top and bottom of the pages relatively uniform. With larger fonts, it's not so easy to conceal that gap at the bottom of some pages. If the screen's aspect ratio were closer to 9:16, a line gap at the bottom would be a much smaller proportion of visible white space, and would also permit more lines of text (and thus enhance the effect of tiny leading adjustments), but with 3:4, it's quite hard to correct. Of course, I'm not a master typographer, so perhaps I'm just ignorant of a good method to resolve the issue.

I use StarOffice to generate my PDFs, and haven't worried too much about my widow-orphan setting causing a large gap at the bottom of the page, my only concern is to avoid having the first or last line of a paragraph on a page by itself (I've set StarOffice to bump any paragraph of four or less lines to the next page). Two or three blank lines at the bottom of a page hasn't been an issue for me.

Compared to others I use a fairly large base font size for my ebooks (14 points) for easier reading. Since I prefer a ragged-right margin, like with the widow-orphan setting mentioned above, the blank space at the end of a line hasn't been an issue. I find fixed spacing easier to read than justified spacing.

Although the above formatting isn't what you usually see in professional printed books, it's easier for me to read. Since page count isn't much of an issue with ebooks, it gives me flexibility to format my ebooks in a way that I want.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I use StarOffice to generate my PDFs, and haven't worried too much about my widow-orphan setting causing a large gap at the bottom of the page, my only concern is to avoid having the first or last line of a paragraph on a page by itself (I've set StarOffice to bump any paragraph of four or less lines to the next page). Two or three blank lines at the bottom of a page hasn't been an issue for me.

Two or three blank lines is a rather huge gap. One line at >10pt is a rather noticeable gap. I think it's even more irritating than leaving in the widows/orphans.

A lot of people can live with it. Of course, a lot of people can live with fake italics, and entirely bolded books too, apparently.