Kindle Typography

[ChaoZ]

I'm an semi-pro print designer and as such, I've grown to love good typography. I'm also somewhat of a geek and I really want to go digital with my reading.

After reading this, I'm a little concerned.

So how bad is it? Does it vary from book to book? Is it getting better?

[matt314159]

Not sure if this is any kind of a complete answer to your questions, but I do see that from the information on the new K3:

New Proprietary Screen Technology - Faster Page Turns, New and Improved Fonts
Kindle’s new, high-contrast display is further optimized with Amazon’s proprietary waveform and font technology to make pages turn faster and fonts sharper. Waveform is a series of electronic pulses that move black and white electronic ink particles to achieve a final gray level for an image or text. We have tuned Kindle's waveform and controller mechanism to make page turning 20% faster. This waveform tuning, combined with new hand-built, custom fonts and font-hinting, make words and letters more crisp, clear, and natural-looking. Font hints are instructions, written as code, that control points on a font character's line and improve legibility at small font sizes where few pixels are available. Hinting is a mix of aesthetic judgments and complicated technical strategies. We've designed our proprietary font-hinting to optimize specifically for the special characteristics of electronic ink.

I think things are probably going in the right direction with each new generation.

[ChaoZ]

To me, those improvements sound more technical than stylistic. The font hinting stuff will certainly make fonts smoother, but will not impact how they are spaced, etc. Still, good to hear I guess.

[malliemcg]

That article is just over 18 months old, and after reading it I would love to know if any of the issues raised have been resolved. The thing about a kindle (and most eBook readers) is that what ships on day 1 does not need to be the final product, there can be updates to both the device's software and to the book itself (potentially).

Anyone out there who has a K2 with the latest firmware - prepared to revisit for those of us who are still in the not yet owners camp?

[karunaji]

One recent Kindle book was clearly poorly proofread OCR from a paper book. It was apparent from the usual typos as 1 in place of l or I etc. Too bad that it was a $10 ebook from a respectable publisher. It also doesn't surprise me that they are making ebooks by scanning the paper format as they probably are so disorganized that no one in the company can find the original digital files anymore. The traditional publishers must be really hating e-books that they are trying to make them looks as little appealing as possible.

The issue with justified text and hyphenation is still there. I personally resent the lack of block center (centered table) attribute is epub or mobi format as it makes poetry formatting look ugly. When I tried to use this attribute in the epub style sheet in Kobo, it didn't simply ignored but rebooted the device.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by ChaoZ

To me, those improvements sound more technical than stylistic. The font hinting stuff will certainly make fonts smoother, but will not impact how they are spaced, etc. Still, good to hear I guess.

On the typography issue, there are no readers that do this well. This is partly the fault of the publisher who takes no time at all to proofread a text before making it available, and partly the fault of the software being used to format the text on the reader. The publishers' failings are just due to a simple rush to get the product out the door and get the money flowing in. The software issue is basically because the standards developers haven't yet found the time to be interested in typographical standards.

If typography is important to you, you will not find any ereader that makes you happy at the moment unless you are willing to take the effort to grab the text of the book you want to read and spend a little time formatting it as a PDF designed for the screen size of your reader. Using InDesign or TeX to generate a properly typeset book in PDF form is still the only method to accomplish what you're after. The problem, obviously, is that you give up much of the functionality of an e-Book: you cannot easily change the font size, etc.

I believe eventually the formatting standards (ePub, etc.) for ereaders will catch up to the nuances of proper typography, but it will still be a few years. Publishers won't pay any attention to proofreading their books to acceptable standards as long as people keep buying them and not returning them. If everyone demanded refunds when they found a badly formatted book or a bunch of idiotic errors in the text, publishers would start paying attention to these details overnight. As it stands right now, though, if these details are important to you and you don't want to spend the time to fix them yourself, then the ereading world is definitely not going to provide you with a good experience at the moment and I would recommend staying with print books for now.

[ChaoZ]

In doing some research last night, I downloaded a sample of Stranger in a Strange Land and compared it to an old physical copy that I have. Interestingly, once I fiddled with the font size and width a bit (on the Kindle PC app), it wasn't too far off. Hyphenation is an issue, but it's not too distracting. The font was actually clearer than my old paperback.

What kinda annoyed me is inconsistency with italics and such.

It'd be fine for novels for the most part, but as illustrated in the example posted before, captions and illustrations would suck. And what about footnotes?

You can substitute your own fonts via a simple hack. I don't know if it will work with the K3, but it probably will. The K3 is supposed to have multiple fonts built in.

I doubt any ebook format, all of which are based on XML (HTML) will ever display a line of text with the precision of a master typesetter. But as the firmware gets better the readers do better at this. Currently missing on every reader I've owned is a good hyphenation system.

Each generation of readers gets better, and the K3 looks like it will be great. I've got its big brother the DXG and it is great.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by ChaoZ

In doing some research last night, I downloaded a sample of Stranger in a Strange Land and compared it to an old physical copy that I have. Interestingly, once I fiddled with the font size and width a bit (on the Kindle PC app), it wasn't too far off. Hyphenation is an issue, but it's not too distracting. The font was actually clearer than my old paperback.

What kinda annoyed me is inconsistency with italics and such.

It'd be fine for novels for the most part, but as illustrated in the example posted before, captions and illustrations would suck. And what about footnotes?

Footnotes aren't really workable in any of the current e-formatting standards. These are usually formatted as endnotes with a link in the text to go back and forth. It's a little cumbersome, but not too bad.

The truly sad thing about typography in e-formatting is that the creators of the various standards went more with either hypertext markup or a similar design, basically a web engine. Ridiculous and woefully inadequate for generating a seriously professional look to the text. The sad thing is they could have used TeX as a markup language and had something right out of the box that generated truly professional looking print on the screen. Another missed opportunity by bumbling corporations that don't know their butt from a hole in the ground.

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Footnotes aren't really workable in any of the current e-formatting standards. These are usually formatted as endnotes with a link in the text to go back and forth. It's a little cumbersome, but not too bad.

The truly sad thing about typography in e-formatting is that the creators of the various standards went more with either hypertext markup or a similar design, basically a web engine. Ridiculous and woefully inadequate for generating a seriously professional look to the text. The sad thing is they could have used TeX as a markup language and had something right out of the box that generated truly professional looking print on the screen.

Is TeX reflowable? If not then it would not be suitable. From what I've read TeX is rarely used for anything other than mathematics books. If the technical book industry snubs it, I can see why the non-technical book industry would too. There is a huge amount of support for HTML and XML, so it makes more sense to go with those standards rather than forcing designers to learn another convoluted system.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Is TeX reflowable? If not then it would not be suitable. From what I've read TeX is rarely used for anything other than mathematics books. If the technical book industry snubs it, I can see why the non-technical book industry would too. There is a huge amount of support for HTML and XML, so it makes more sense to go with those standards rather than forcing designers to learn another convoluted system.

TeX was not designed to be a reflowable format, but that would be a trivial obstacle to overcome with a little programming. Press the zoom button and even choose your zoom percent if you want, the TeX engine can regenerate the document on the fly and even store it in a subfolder for easy access later. Voila.

The only reason the publishing industry doesn't use TeX is because it is a markup language, not a WYSIWYG environment like Quark or InDesign. TeX can do anything those other platforms can do, it's just that Quark and InDesign are easier to understand on the screen. But it would be essentially perfect for a e-format.

[slm]

Originally Posted by ChaoZ

I'm an semi-pro print designer and as such, I've grown to love good typography. I'm also somewhat of a geek and I really want to go digital with my reading.

After reading this, I'm a little concerned.

So how bad is it? Does it vary from book to book? Is it getting better?

A lot depends on your point of view. The article you cited includes the following sentence:

"Unfortunately, font size can be controlled by the user on the Kindle"

From my point of view the biggest reason for reading a book electronically is because it lets me change font sizes to sizes I can read comfortably and this criticism seems to be lunacy.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by slm

A lot depends on your point of view. The article you cited includes the following sentence:

"Unfortunately, font size can be controlled by the user on the Kindle"

From my point of view the biggest reason for reading a book electronically is because it lets me change font sizes to sizes I can read comfortably and this criticism seems to be lunacy.

I think what the author of that study was trying to point out, and rightly so, is that there are some documents or parts of some documents that do not lend themselves well to resizing fonts. The fanaticism many people have on these boards toward a totally resizeable, completely user-controlled document really only works with a plain-text book. For any other kind of document or for parts of a document that contains tables or graphs or captions, etc., resizing these can have very detrimental effects. A true e-publishing standard should take that into account and allow for a part of a document that doesn't just blindly increase the size of all text when the user presses the zoom button. This is just another shortcoming of the current blunt design of e-reading formats and is another example of how this entire e-publishing industry is still in its infancy.

[slm]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

I think what the author of that study was trying to point out, and rightly so, is that there are some documents or parts of some documents that do not lend themselves well to resizing fonts. The fanaticism many people have on these boards toward a totally resizeable, completely user-controlled document really only works with a plain-text book. For any other kind of document or for parts of a document that contains tables or graphs or captions, etc., resizing these can have very detrimental effects. A true e-publishing standard should take that into account and allow for a part of a document that doesn't just blindly increase the size of all text when the user presses the zoom button. This is just another shortcoming of the current blunt design of e-reading formats and is another example of how this entire e-publishing industry is still in its infancy.

I guess I'm one of those fanatics. While I would certainly appreciate more intelligent resizing algorithms for some types of things (and, indeed, some devices do provide better solutions for images), I can not understand why anyone would think it unfortunate to be able to resize, even if the option results in badly-formatted tables and such.

In the actual article, the author's concern seemed to be that freedom to resize means that the algorithm for "full" justification often leaves unsightly rivers. It is certainly true that the software often does a poor job in that regard, but I just don't understand why choice--the ability of the reader to decide which problem is more troubling to a particular reader, legibility or aesthetics--should ever be "unfortunate."

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by slm

In the actual article, the author's concern seemed to be that freedom to resize means that the algorithm for "full" justification often leaves unsightly rivers. It is certainly true that the software often does a poor job in that regard, but I just don't understand why choice--the ability of the reader to decide which problem is more troubling to a particular reader, legibility or aesthetics--should ever be "unfortunate."

I see your point, but it's "unfortunate" in that the software is not intelligent enough to make formatting choices based on good rules of typography. That's all that would be required. TeX and InDesign use basically the same paragraph layout engine, and they take into account whitespace rivers and so on. HTML layout engines don't care and will just throw it down on the screen based on font size and line fitting alone, and of course hyphenation is not even considered in most e-format layout engines. Given the lack of intelligent software design, allowing the user to just randomly choose any level of font size unfortunately does result in some pretty ugly page layouts. Hopefully this will improve with time. It's just pathetic watching the e-publishing industry re-invent the wheel when perfectly good solutions already exist that are light-years ahead of where the industry is today.