Website for the Sony Reader: Ajax, LaTeX and RSS

[unkilbeeg]

Latext2rft *does* give you options to include math formulae as images. I haven't tested it, and it seems to me there have been some complaints that Sony's rtf support doesn't include images.

[Hadrien]

So, we're still working on the newspaper part of the website, and the support for russian, japanese and chinese is almost ready... (support for math formulas, footnotes, verbatim for those of you writing or reading tech books is on the way too)

But I'd like to have some feedback about how the books look for those using the Sony Reader and iRex iLiad, in order to improve the templates for these devices. Do you like the font, the font size ? Would it be better to have the text in bold for the whole book ? Is the margin size right for you ?
We'll try to adapt these templates as soon as we have enough feedback on the matter.

Here's 2 PDF files with this post to see the font size changes that I'd like to make for the Sony Reader.

[NormB]

I like the new font you posted for New Grub Street better than the old one. If you update the entire database I will probably go back and download those books again that I have already downloaded with the old font.

Your site is looking very good. Keep up the good work.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by NormB

I like the new font you posted for New Grub Street better than the old one. If you update the entire database I will probably go back and download those books again that I have already downloaded with the old font.

Your site is looking very good. Keep up the good work.

Ok. Tried to generate the whole book in bold too, but I don't think it's suited for a template. I'll change the font size for the Sony Reader template, but in the meantime, you can simply change your custom PDF settings to reflect these changes.

[Hadrien]

So... We did a whole lot of changes on the LaTeX side, to make everything faster and support bbcode-like features mostly. We still have one or two bugs left, but we're really close from something much more final as far as generating PDF is concerned.

I just created a PDF file for the reader with a few fonts in it and 2 different sizes:
- size: 14, inter: 15, should be the new template
- size: 12, inter: 14, the old template
If ppl could check which font they believe looks better on their reader (the old one, Adobe Times looks a bit too grey instead of black for my taste on the Reader), and post their impressions here, it would be great. If you believe another font would be even better, just give me the font family for it and I'll add it to this sample PDF (for example, bookman font family is 'pag').

I'll do a much longer post afterwards about all the improvements we've made (a list of the bbcodes you can use mostly, like bold, quotes etc...).

[Antonio]

Alright, I am looking at the font test on my reader, and have to say that Helvetica, Bookman and Utopia look much better than Times or Palatino.

So it would seem that any font that goes really thin on the curved parts of letters such as 's' and 'o' is going to look too light for the reader, unless it is quite big, and in bold. For instance, the identifying line "Font size 14 - Inter 15" looks fantastically clear.

Any of the three mentioned above are fine from a legibility standpoint, but I for one would say that Helvetica is the more aesthetically pleasing of the bunch, as well as the most generic, and so I'd vote for that being the default.

I do love the look of the books off the site, but I have found as well that they do look lighter (or less dark) than, for instance, the books downloaded from manybooks.com. I wonder what font is used in the standard "Sony" books on that site.

[Hadrien]

OK. Well the books right now are generated with Times which is kinda grey-ish on the reader (anti-aliasing issues I guess). With a new template and a better font it should be much better. And if you don't like the template, there's still the opportunity to make custom PDFs, you'll just have to wait for a few more seconds ...

[Antonio]

I am using the custom feature, set to Helvetica at 10, which looks good to me.

On another topic, I would love to be able to get things that wouldn't necesarily be submitted into this format. Any thoughts about adding that type of functionality at some point?

And what about pre-existing PDFs, such as the reports done by the IMF and World Bank, for instance. I would absolutely love, love, love to get those formatted for the Reader as beautifully as the novels are.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Antonio

I am using the custom feature, set to Helvetica at 10, which looks good to me.

On another topic, I would love to be able to get things that wouldn't necesarily be submitted into this format. Any thoughts about adding that type of functionality at some point?

And what about pre-existing PDFs, such as the reports done by the IMF and World Bank, for instance. I would absolutely love, love, love to get those formatted for the Reader as beautifully as the novels are.

Well, you could use the second part of the website to create whatever you need (or LaTeX, since that's what we're using). We might work on a way to create files without using the Ajax interface, but there's a whole lot of things that we need to deal with first, once the beta's finished we'll start working on these kind of features... I guess we could make something that recognizes chapters, parts etc... within a single text file and then format it our way. Once the main sections of the website will be ready (Discover, Share & News), I believe we'll work on a special one for Science, with a way to submit .tex files and reformat them the right way in order to use them with any e-ink reader.