7 ms·

Apple kills fonts in iBooks, strikes blow to standards

74 points by mikecane 16y ago

bonaldi 16y ago
I'm with Apple all the way here. If Mike got what he wanted, I'd have a much poorer user experience. There's no way I'm ploughing through a book set in some godawful sans. Apple's way allows me to choose the fonts I want in a book. "Serif, ew!!" tells me everything I need to know about not letting designers like this control my eBooks.
- visural 16y ago
  That doesn't change the fact that Apple is ignoring the published standard. If that's what they want to do, then they should call it a proprietary format and let people choose whether they want to use it, not have their cake and eat it too.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    Good point. Does the standard insist on the specified fonts, or are clients allowed to overrule them according to user prefs? If the latter, a fix is just an additional "book default" entry in the fonts menu. (If the former, that's a lousy standard, right there)
    - gte910h 16y ago
      The standard doesn't do anything about specific fonts. The standard DOES have facilities to set a font family, i.e. serif, sans-serif, fixed-width, etc. It throws off formatting for a lot of books if you screw with that sort of thing. Which is what Apple is doing.
- silentOpen 16y ago
  How do you deal with sans in a web browser? Custom stylesheets? Why not allow custom stylesheets in your ebook reader? Better yet, why have this separate ebook reader at all and put the books in the browser (potentially with extended UI elements and support like PDFs) where they belong. If I buy a book, I want to get the book how the publisher, editor, author, and designer intended. It is wrong for Apple to intentionally change the display of the book from the design that was intended. If you want to override the styling in your books, fine, but this shouldn't be mandated.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    Why not allow custom stylesheets? Because the vast majority of Apple's customers can't write them, is why. As I said below, perhaps the specified fonts should be a default with alternatives in a menu, but until then, it's vastly preferable that they use the reader's font and not the book's. This isn't a printed book, as the woeful justification should prove. Designers don't get nearly as much control. (Ultimately, I think they will offer an option to use the specified fonts. There's so much wrong with iBooks it feels like the most unfinished 1.0 product out of Apple since Aperture) As for putting them in the browser: a vanilla browser is possibly the worst way to display seriously large amounts of plain text. By the time you've added all the custom elements needed for good reading, you're at a full app anyway. It could be a web app, sure, but that's a different discussion.
    - silentOpen 16y ago
      You don't need to give the user the full power to write a custom stylesheet, just a friendly way to change common properties like paragraph font. I am not suggesting a vanilla browser at all. I am suggesting putting all of the browsing-like functionality (books, newspapers, arbitrary hypertext) in the same application. I don't care whether it is compiled-in, a plugin, or a web app but if it's not even in the browser then it's a bad user experience from my perspective. I want a unified reading experience. I want unified search shortcuts. I want unified bookmarks and hyperlinks in books that open web pages in tabs. Forcing users to switch apps for a data format that accomplishes most of the same things that the Web accomplishes diminishes the value of the format to the user. Application balkanization is not the answer and the fighting between vendor and publisher over page styling has already played out in the browser.
- mikecane 16y ago
  >>>If Mike got what he wanted Do you mean me? I'm not the author of the post.
tptacek 16y ago
What's the font story on the Kindle? Is this guy asking for a pony?
- gte910h 16y ago
  ePub is a standard. They're breaking it, making ePub books not show as they should. Mobipocket (what kindle has) is a different standard. Amazon is mobipocket compliant.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Thanks, I understand that Kindle is a different standard. I have a Kindle reader app on my iPad, but not an actual Kindle app, so I'm wondering: does the Kindle allow authors to control fonts?
    - Niten 16y ago
      Every book I've purchased on the Kindle shows up in exactly the same font, and likewise for any documents that I email to my Kindle. If the Kindle hardware supports multiple font faces (aside from italic or bold face variants), I haven't seen any evidence of it. Fortunately for me, I like the Kindle's font, so I don't consider it an issue for the type of reading for which I use the device.
      - gte910h 16y ago
        It supports multiple font families (which paradoxically, is what the "Face" attribute in HTML's font tag actually points at).
    - gte910h 16y ago
      It allows the same as the e-pub standard does, aka, font families (the face attribute in the font tag takes a valid like "serif"). http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=30&categoryID=11 http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?e... Are all the kindle supported html tags. Basically, Apple is doing exactly what Microsoft did with their early versions of IE6, where they rendered web pages differently than the others out there. They're ignoring a tag that's part of a standard because they think it looks better. It isn't like you can say font=comic sans in an ePub book and expect it to take effect. What they're doing though is disallowing the setting of font families for certain types of tags.
tumult 16y ago
This is such a minor niggle compared to not having real typesetting via TeX or something. Nothing else is even worth complaining about until these stupid eBook readers can do real (as in the non-ragged-right and non-shitty-justify) layout. "But it's CPU expensive!" That shit worked decades ago, it is definitely doable. Get off your butts! Or I might have to do it!
- mikecane 16y ago
  These stupid eBook readers are transient duct-tape technology that will fade away. Books will be on the web. Concentrate on the beautiful type for that.
  - WiseWeasel 16y ago
    I could see this being appealing; offering books as HTML5 'apps' behind a paywall. You could exploit local storage to cache them on various devices.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  It's completely doable, as Eucalyptus shows on the iPhone. There's absolutely no excuse for not doing proper typesetting, other than they simply don't notice the lack of it. I expect that of Sony, but I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people that really care about these details on the team.
  - tumult 16y ago
    Eucalyptus does not look particularly great to me. Is it using a custom algorithm?
    - bonaldi 16y ago
      It is, yes, even down to adding typographer's quotes where the original lacks them (another iBooks oversight). It's not as good at H&J as you would be doing it by hand, but I've yet to see a river anything like those that snake through iBooks pages.
jokermatt999 16y ago
If Apple truly insists that they know better than the publishers, why not have an option for "Apple's font choice" vs "Standards" in the app? If they still want to impose their font choice on users, they could even have it enabled by default. This is ridiculous that they can just ignore standards, and people will write it off because it's Apple. Design matters, but so do standards. Don't impose design over standards. If you must put design first, don't completely ignore standards like Apple did.
tta 16y ago
For once I agree with Apple's big-brother…ing. iBooks lets you choose a font for the content you're reading, and it'd be an absolute nightmare having content that isn't consistent.
- jcl 16y ago
  If I'm reading the article correctly, though, iBooks is making content less consistent. If the author puts custom fonts on all their tags, iBooks is going to honor all of them except <p>, <div>, and <span>. So you'll be reading along in Apple's serif typeface, then suddenly there will be a word an <em> tag rendered in sans-serif italics. As the article author said: "Ew."
commieneko 16y ago
This is actually a _very_ complicated issue, and while I frown disapprovingly at this, I don't completely agree that what Apple is doing isn't right. At least for now. Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue. The web is a horror show for a _good_ designer, especially one that values good typography. The things that bad designers do online, even for major, big dollar sites give me nightmares. I'm not talking about "pretty" or "arty" or even elegance. I'm talking about basic readability stuff. Like it or not, for a while most eBooks are going to be churned out en masse by sullen, angry publishers that don't want to spend a dime on the tech that they are (correctly) afraid is going to eat their lunch. They are going to have a big auto-scripted sausage grinder cranking out pasty white tubes of text tied off at irregular intervals. I suspect that Apple is simply trying to make sure these tubes are boiled and sanitary, at least from a typographical point of view. (Sorry for the metaphor, I'm in a mood...) Books with non-specific formatting, which includes most fiction, the primary market target for Apple in this endeavor, are going to be readable, if not elegant. Notice what they are doing with Safari and their new "Reader" feature? Maybe they are planning to train their users to throw the "kill switch" on stupid design, and after a while they'll add a similar feature to iBooks, and turn the fonts and formatting back on. Or maybe not. His Steveness is fairly inscrutable... The good news is that if you are a control freak (and what designer isn't, another reason for the lock down) then you can simply design for PDF. Which, if you require actual layout control, and not just typographical control, is a world class standard (one with LOTS of design options.) Having said all that, a well designed book is a beautiful thing and a joy to read. Not because you are marveling at the design, but because you probably don't even notice it.
- gte910h 16y ago
  >Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue. Then make their own format, separate it from ePub. ePub is a ebook standard that pre-exists Apple's foray into book publishing. Make their own standard and don't call their reader ePub compliant. They're making the IE5 of eBook readers....
  - commieneko 16y ago
kmfrk 16y ago
I don't know what the fallacy terminology is, but the arguments sounds like "this decision is bad; thus this other decision is good". I get the criticism, but the attractiveness of the alternative presupposes some very ideal conditions which render the alternative inferior. While the maximum quality might have been better with the alternative, the minimum and average/median quality will be consistently better with Apple's choice. I shudder to think that I might pay for a book only to find out that it is typeset in justified Comic Sans (or Marker Felt ...) with no tracking, and whichever atrocities the publisher might maul the text proper with.
- maw 16y ago
  It sounds like http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/ http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/ to me. And I agree that that's what the argument sounds like.
mattparcher 16y ago
It will break iBooks as people design beautiful standards-compliant ebooks that look great in other readers that support standards. And yet, the author shows an example of proper behavior using Arial for the book’s body text, and Trebuchet in a garish red to mark up the screenshot. There are many beautiful fonts, but these are not two of them. Edit: see http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html as to why Arial is so inferior to it’s predecessor, Helvetica.
- jcl 16y ago
  You might want to reread the article you linked to. That is Helvetica in the screenshot -- note in particular the horizontal end on the "e" and the vertical end on the "r". The beauty and superiority are more apparent if you click on the image and go to the bigger version on Flickr. ;)
  - eru 16y ago
    The magical Helvetica.. Still probably not a good choice for the body of a text.
yogsototh 16y ago
I am with Apple. On the web I use readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability) a lot. I am happy to be able to read with fonts readable for me. If I could I'll always surf using readability. For books I believe overriding designer choice by _yours_ is the best solution for a good read.
xcombinator 16y ago
I like to change the defaults. When you use to read green on black instead of black over white, or change the font size you realize that the designer only though in one size, and one colour. PDFs are perfect at only one layout, and font size. At different ones it is just horrible. It doesn't work right on an iphone-android small screen. When designers choose fonts, it only works at one size, at different ones, areas seems different with the same font.
lizcastro 16y ago
Just for the record, the example in that article is not about serif vs sans-serif. That was just the simplest example possible. The "Ew" means, "it didn't do what the standard spec says it was supposed to," NOT "I don't like serif fonts". Whether or not ePub lets a book designer choose a font is not up to Apple. ePub is a published standard that Apple pretends to support. The point of the article is that Apple lets book designers choose fonts for many elements in a book, but not all. This is completely non-standard and will lead to hacks. Whether you would like Apple to choose 6 fonts for you to choose from, or book designers to offer different choices is completely beside the point. Or at the very least, a very different point.
- alnayyir 16y ago
  >NOT "I don't like serif fonts". The person who criticized the article for that isn't going to see this comment. Don't write manifestos defending yourself to the general public, reply to specific comments on specific points. Anything else is a waste of time.

74 points by mikecane 16y ago

I'm with Apple all the way here. If Mike got what he wanted, I'd have a much poorer user experience. There's no way I'm ploughing through a book set in some godawful sans. Apple's way allows me to choose the fonts I want in a book. "Serif, ew!!" tells me everything I need to know about not letting designers like this control my eBooks.

visural 16y ago
That doesn't change the fact that Apple is ignoring the published standard. If that's what they want to do, then they should call it a proprietary format and let people choose whether they want to use it, not have their cake and eat it too.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  Good point. Does the standard insist on the specified fonts, or are clients allowed to overrule them according to user prefs? If the latter, a fix is just an additional "book default" entry in the fonts menu. (If the former, that's a lousy standard, right there)
  - gte910h 16y ago
    The standard doesn't do anything about specific fonts. The standard DOES have facilities to set a font family, i.e. serif, sans-serif, fixed-width, etc. It throws off formatting for a lot of books if you screw with that sort of thing. Which is what Apple is doing.
silentOpen 16y ago
How do you deal with sans in a web browser? Custom stylesheets? Why not allow custom stylesheets in your ebook reader? Better yet, why have this separate ebook reader at all and put the books in the browser (potentially with extended UI elements and support like PDFs) where they belong. If I buy a book, I want to get the book how the publisher, editor, author, and designer intended. It is wrong for Apple to intentionally change the display of the book from the design that was intended. If you want to override the styling in your books, fine, but this shouldn't be mandated.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  Why not allow custom stylesheets? Because the vast majority of Apple's customers can't write them, is why. As I said below, perhaps the specified fonts should be a default with alternatives in a menu, but until then, it's vastly preferable that they use the reader's font and not the book's. This isn't a printed book, as the woeful justification should prove. Designers don't get nearly as much control. (Ultimately, I think they will offer an option to use the specified fonts. There's so much wrong with iBooks it feels like the most unfinished 1.0 product out of Apple since Aperture) As for putting them in the browser: a vanilla browser is possibly the worst way to display seriously large amounts of plain text. By the time you've added all the custom elements needed for good reading, you're at a full app anyway. It could be a web app, sure, but that's a different discussion.
  - silentOpen 16y ago
    You don't need to give the user the full power to write a custom stylesheet, just a friendly way to change common properties like paragraph font. I am not suggesting a vanilla browser at all. I am suggesting putting all of the browsing-like functionality (books, newspapers, arbitrary hypertext) in the same application. I don't care whether it is compiled-in, a plugin, or a web app but if it's not even in the browser then it's a bad user experience from my perspective. I want a unified reading experience. I want unified search shortcuts. I want unified bookmarks and hyperlinks in books that open web pages in tabs. Forcing users to switch apps for a data format that accomplishes most of the same things that the Web accomplishes diminishes the value of the format to the user. Application balkanization is not the answer and the fighting between vendor and publisher over page styling has already played out in the browser.
mikecane 16y ago
>>>If Mike got what he wanted Do you mean me? I'm not the author of the post.

tptacek 16y ago

What's the font story on the Kindle? Is this guy asking for a pony?

gte910h 16y ago
ePub is a standard. They're breaking it, making ePub books not show as they should. Mobipocket (what kindle has) is a different standard. Amazon is mobipocket compliant.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Thanks, I understand that Kindle is a different standard. I have a Kindle reader app on my iPad, but not an actual Kindle app, so I'm wondering: does the Kindle allow authors to control fonts?
  - Niten 16y ago
    Every book I've purchased on the Kindle shows up in exactly the same font, and likewise for any documents that I email to my Kindle. If the Kindle hardware supports multiple font faces (aside from italic or bold face variants), I haven't seen any evidence of it. Fortunately for me, I like the Kindle's font, so I don't consider it an issue for the type of reading for which I use the device.
    - gte910h 16y ago
      It supports multiple font families (which paradoxically, is what the "Face" attribute in HTML's font tag actually points at).
  - gte910h 16y ago
    It allows the same as the e-pub standard does, aka, font families (the face attribute in the font tag takes a valid like "serif"). http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=30&categoryID=11 http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?e... Are all the kindle supported html tags. Basically, Apple is doing exactly what Microsoft did with their early versions of IE6, where they rendered web pages differently than the others out there. They're ignoring a tag that's part of a standard because they think it looks better. It isn't like you can say font=comic sans in an ePub book and expect it to take effect. What they're doing though is disallowing the setting of font families for certain types of tags.

tumult 16y ago

This is such a minor niggle compared to not having real typesetting via TeX or something. Nothing else is even worth complaining about until these stupid eBook readers can do real (as in the non-ragged-right and non-shitty-justify) layout. "But it's CPU expensive!" That shit worked decades ago, it is definitely doable. Get off your butts! Or I might have to do it!

mikecane 16y ago
These stupid eBook readers are transient duct-tape technology that will fade away. Books will be on the web. Concentrate on the beautiful type for that.
- WiseWeasel 16y ago
  I could see this being appealing; offering books as HTML5 'apps' behind a paywall. You could exploit local storage to cache them on various devices.
bonaldi 16y ago
It's completely doable, as Eucalyptus shows on the iPhone. There's absolutely no excuse for not doing proper typesetting, other than they simply don't notice the lack of it. I expect that of Sony, but I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people that really care about these details on the team.
- tumult 16y ago
  Eucalyptus does not look particularly great to me. Is it using a custom algorithm?
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    It is, yes, even down to adding typographer's quotes where the original lacks them (another iBooks oversight). It's not as good at H&J as you would be doing it by hand, but I've yet to see a river anything like those that snake through iBooks pages.

jokermatt999 16y ago

If Apple truly insists that they know better than the publishers, why not have an option for "Apple's font choice" vs "Standards" in the app? If they still want to impose their font choice on users, they could even have it enabled by default. This is ridiculous that they can just ignore standards, and people will write it off because it's Apple. Design matters, but so do standards. Don't impose design over standards. If you must put design first, don't completely ignore standards like Apple did.

tta 16y ago

For once I agree with Apple's big-brother…ing. iBooks lets you choose a font for the content you're reading, and it'd be an absolute nightmare having content that isn't consistent.

jcl 16y ago
If I'm reading the article correctly, though, iBooks is making content less consistent. If the author puts custom fonts on all their tags, iBooks is going to honor all of them except <p>, <div>, and <span>. So you'll be reading along in Apple's serif typeface, then suddenly there will be a word an <em> tag rendered in sans-serif italics. As the article author said: "Ew."

commieneko 16y ago

This is actually a _very_ complicated issue, and while I frown disapprovingly at this, I don't completely agree that what Apple is doing isn't right. At least for now. Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue. The web is a horror show for a _good_ designer, especially one that values good typography. The things that bad designers do online, even for major, big dollar sites give me nightmares. I'm not talking about "pretty" or "arty" or even elegance. I'm talking about basic readability stuff. Like it or not, for a while most eBooks are going to be churned out en masse by sullen, angry publishers that don't want to spend a dime on the tech that they are (correctly) afraid is going to eat their lunch. They are going to have a big auto-scripted sausage grinder cranking out pasty white tubes of text tied off at irregular intervals. I suspect that Apple is simply trying to make sure these tubes are boiled and sanitary, at least from a typographical point of view. (Sorry for the metaphor, I'm in a mood...) Books with non-specific formatting, which includes most fiction, the primary market target for Apple in this endeavor, are going to be readable, if not elegant. Notice what they are doing with Safari and their new "Reader" feature? Maybe they are planning to train their users to throw the "kill switch" on stupid design, and after a while they'll add a similar feature to iBooks, and turn the fonts and formatting back on. Or maybe not. His Steveness is fairly inscrutable... The good news is that if you are a control freak (and what designer isn't, another reason for the lock down) then you can simply design for PDF. Which, if you require actual layout control, and not just typographical control, is a world class standard (one with LOTS of design options.) Having said all that, a well designed book is a beautiful thing and a joy to read. Not because you are marveling at the design, but because you probably don't even notice it.

gte910h 16y ago
>Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue. Then make their own format, separate it from ePub. ePub is a ebook standard that pre-exists Apple's foray into book publishing. Make their own standard and don't call their reader ePub compliant. They're making the IE5 of eBook readers....
- commieneko 16y ago

kmfrk 16y ago

I don't know what the fallacy terminology is, but the arguments sounds like "this decision is bad; thus this other decision is good". I get the criticism, but the attractiveness of the alternative presupposes some very ideal conditions which render the alternative inferior. While the maximum quality might have been better with the alternative, the minimum and average/median quality will be consistently better with Apple's choice. I shudder to think that I might pay for a book only to find out that it is typeset in justified Comic Sans (or Marker Felt ...) with no tracking, and whichever atrocities the publisher might maul the text proper with.

maw 16y ago
It sounds like http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/ http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/ to me. And I agree that that's what the argument sounds like.

mattparcher 16y ago

It will break iBooks as people design beautiful standards-compliant ebooks that look great in other readers that support standards. And yet, the author shows an example of proper behavior using Arial for the book’s body text, and Trebuchet in a garish red to mark up the screenshot. There are many beautiful fonts, but these are not two of them. Edit: see http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html as to why Arial is so inferior to it’s predecessor, Helvetica.

jcl 16y ago
You might want to reread the article you linked to. That is Helvetica in the screenshot -- note in particular the horizontal end on the "e" and the vertical end on the "r". The beauty and superiority are more apparent if you click on the image and go to the bigger version on Flickr. ;)
- eru 16y ago
  The magical Helvetica.. Still probably not a good choice for the body of a text.

yogsototh 16y ago

I am with Apple. On the web I use readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability) a lot. I am happy to be able to read with fonts readable for me. If I could I'll always surf using readability. For books I believe overriding designer choice by _yours_ is the best solution for a good read.

xcombinator 16y ago

I like to change the defaults. When you use to read green on black instead of black over white, or change the font size you realize that the designer only though in one size, and one colour. PDFs are perfect at only one layout, and font size. At different ones it is just horrible. It doesn't work right on an iphone-android small screen. When designers choose fonts, it only works at one size, at different ones, areas seems different with the same font.

lizcastro 16y ago

Just for the record, the example in that article is not about serif vs sans-serif. That was just the simplest example possible. The "Ew" means, "it didn't do what the standard spec says it was supposed to," NOT "I don't like serif fonts". Whether or not ePub lets a book designer choose a font is not up to Apple. ePub is a published standard that Apple pretends to support. The point of the article is that Apple lets book designers choose fonts for many elements in a book, but not all. This is completely non-standard and will lead to hacks. Whether you would like Apple to choose 6 fonts for you to choose from, or book designers to offer different choices is completely beside the point. Or at the very least, a very different point.

alnayyir 16y ago
>NOT "I don't like serif fonts". The person who criticized the article for that isn't going to see this comment. Don't write manifestos defending yourself to the general public, reply to specific comments on specific points. Anything else is a waste of time.