Formatting an eBook - Left justify or Justified

[tomsem]

Hyphenation can be done in raw text (soft or conditional hyphens) but ideally it is up to the text layout engine to do hyphenation - just in practical terms, soft hyphens are difficult to error check and should only be inserted when automatic hyphenation messes up. (Most browsers ignore soft hyphens; Kindle actually displays a little square so you have to strip these out before creating a MOBI format ebook.)

'Correct' automatic hyphenation requires a language-specific hyphenation dictionary (hyphenation rules being irregular), but some heuristics can get applied even then (because dictionaries are never complete). For example, 'confusticating' is not in the dictionary, but with English heuristics you could safely hyphenate it as 'con-fusti-cat-ing'.

While most e-readers don't seem to support hyphenation of any kind (kindle won't even break a hard-hyphenated word), I've discovered that Kindle for iOS and Mac do (Kindle for Windows doesn't). It looks like hyphenation is a service the core frameworks provides, at least on OS X (the iOS docs are not as explicit on this). If that's the case, it is interesting that Apple didn't choose to support hyphenation in iBooks. When there is hyphenation, I wonder how apps determine what language to specify - not sure all ebooks necessarily specify this in metadata (even if they should), and of course, there could be more than one language being in use in a given book so you would need to have lang tags to delineate these.

I'm kind of neutral on the justification issue, except I think users should have the power to select whatever looks good to them. Hyphenation should be a part of the mix, and again I think it should be largely a matter of personal preference. E-book creators have no idea what the characteristics of the reading system will be (screen size/line length/line spacing/typeface) and hence they are in no position to dictate these terms.

[SoZo]

I like the spacing within the text to be even. I find when I am forced to read anything justified that it hinders the flow of reading.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by SoZo

I like the spacing within the text to be even. I find when I am forced to read anything justified that it hinders the flow of reading.

How did you read paper books before eBooks? pBooks have uneven spacing.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How did you read paper books before eBooks? pBooks have uneven spacing.

Most pbooks use micro-justification (letter spacing changes as well as adding extra space between words) and manual assisted hyphenation. Heck, I remember Wordstar on a Qume daisy wheel printer way back in 1986 doing micro-justification and it looked pretty decent except when it decided to shrink the space between words to allow a line to fit.

In contrast, ebooks tend to add normal (~.25 em) spaces between words which at times gets very ugly.

Perhaps one day an ereader will handle micro-justification and feathering so we'll stop hearing complaints about gaps at the bottoms of pages as well but that day isn't here yet.

And the sad part is that in the 10 years since this thread was started, there have been no real improvements.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Perhaps one day an ereader will handle micro-justification and feathering so we'll stop hearing complaints about gaps at the bottoms of pages as well but that day isn't here yet.

And the sad part is that in the 10 years since this thread was started, there have been no real improvements.

Don't hold your breath.

The last reader app produced by people who really cared about typography was MS READER. And we saw what that got them.

Wall garden apps care about selling more than presentation and paid apps care more about feature checklists. And the industry people who care about presentation don't care about ebooks.

That's life.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DNSB

And the sad part is that in the 10 years since this thread was started, there have been no real improvements.

Except if you wear your reading glasses (if needed) and have a 7" @300 dpi screen with font size similar to a mass market paperback then the full justification isn't bad. On a 6" screen it's not so good.
On a 6" with lower DPI and a bigger font because the smaller font looks bad or you really need glasses, the full justification starts to look poor. A 6" phone screen is worse because it's aspect ratio means it's narrower than even a 5" Sony PRS350.

[ps67]

With the obvious exception of poetry I don't like Left Justify and, if I find it in a book, I transform it in Justified.

May be that many people don't really care of it (and of hyphenation ecc) and simply read the book, but I am not so lucky so I had to learn a bit of css/html to handle and modify what I don't like.

[sun surfer]

I would generally prefer justified so that's what I voted for, but I really don't like when justification isn't done well. My most comfortable ereader text size is rather large and the worst is when one long word is ridiculously stretched out across a line all by itself.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I would generally prefer justified so that's what I voted for, but I really don't like when justification isn't done well. My most comfortable ereader text size is rather large and the worst is when one long word is ridiculously stretched out across a line all by itself.

Or three longs words in a row so you get two words on a line with ~25% of the line blank between them.

For me, these old eyes need a larger font size which exacerbates the justification issue.

[DNSB]

Just prior to the pandemic, I checked a large type version of a book that I was enjoying on my ereader out of the library and compared the two. I liked the justification on the large type pbook.

Yes, the large type book was micro-justified as you could see some lines where the space between characters was increased as well as the space between words. Unless I was looking for it, it didn't really kick me in the eye and the flush left and right margins were aesthetically satisfying.

Then I set my Forma to justified and the difference was very noticeable. Partly that my Forma has a narrower page so fewer characters on the line even in landscape mode but also that justification on the Forma, as far as I can tell, only uses increased space between words to justify which, to me, is extremely annoying. A "Rivers 'R Us" page is a pain to read.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Just prior to the pandemic, I checked a large type version of a book that I was enjoying on my ereader out of the library and compared the two. I liked the justification on the large type pbook.

Yes, the large type book was micro-justified as you could see some lines where the space between characters was increased as well as the space between words. Unless I was looking for it, it didn't really kick me in the eye and the flush left and right margins were aesthetically satisfying.

Then I set my Forma to justified and the difference was very noticeable. Partly that my Forma has a narrower page so fewer characters on the line even in landscape mode but also that justification on the Forma, as far as I can tell, only uses increased space between words to justify which, to me, is extremely annoying. A "Rivers 'R Us" page is a pain to read.

Are you reading ePub or KePub? RMSDK does use variable width spaces whereas KePub does not.

[hobnail]

I think it was on the Daisy or epub consortium accessibility site (or are they the same thing) and they recommended ragged right because justified causes uneven spacing between words.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Are you reading ePub or KePub? RMSDK does use variable width spaces whereas KePub does not.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Of course kepubs have variable width spaces between words. How else could it do full justification?

I'm looking at one now. If you take any line in isolation then the spacing is constant between each word on that line. But the word spacing on the next/previous lines probably won't be the same as that line. It depends on how long the words are are on each line.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Are you reading ePub or KePub? RMSDK does use variable width spaces whereas KePub does not.

Near as I can tell, the spacing is the same using either kepub or epub in the small sample I checked. The problem is that the only way to justify is to increase the spacing between the words and not the spacing between the characters in a word.

[ps67]

If You are talking about something like this:

https://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/la.../microtype.pdf

I don't know when it will be possible. But after many years colour is coming (let's hope) so also microtypography for erader one day could come.

Until now Epub2 - Epub3 and their implementation in ereader are far from the perfection of Latex (and do it once, in a physical page - pdf is like a phisical page - is much easier).