5 ms·

On a slightly related note, I find it incredible that the Kindle (and presumably other e-readers) still fail to support typographic standards that printed books

On a slightly related note, I find it incredible that the Kindle (and presumably other e-readers) still fail to support typographic standards that printed books have had for hundreds of years. It took them years to support hyphenation at all, and now that they do, the number of times I’ve turned a page only to find it completely blank but for the very last syllable of the very last word of the chapter is infuriating. I know it’s a small thing, but it instantly rips me out of the story and reminds me of the imperfections of the thing. For a single-purpose device by one of the world’s largest tech companies, that’s just not good enough.

a13n 8y ago
What do you expect it to do differently in that case?
- dcuthbertson 8y ago
  How about proper widow/orphan control?
- bhaak 8y ago
  This is a problem since printed books exist. There are lots of different options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans#Guidelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans#Guidelines The kindle also doesn't support proper kerning. Sorry if I told you that and you can't unsee it now. But you can install 3rd party reading software on jailbroken kindles like koreader that fixes some of the deficiencies.
  - gsnedders 8y ago
    And we have the orphans and widows properties in CSS that provide some control across fragments, though they're not supported in Firefox (or EdgeHTML, for however much longer that matters).
  - UsernameProxy 8y ago
    I was just trying to find _koreader_ on the Play Store, but am not having much luck. What's the actual name, please?
    - bhaak 8y ago
      I don't know if it's in the Play Store but you can download the APK directly from GitHub: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases Although Koreader has been originally developed for e-ink devices. I'm not sure how well it has been optimized for normal tablet screens.
      - UsernameProxy 8y ago
        Great - thanks for the link.
gsnedders 8y ago
I know several people on the publishing side around the digital publishing groups around the W3C, but a large part of the problem is most of the companies making the popular readers (both those with strict hardware/software integration, like most eInk readers, and those without, like most phone/tablet/computer-based readers) simply have no interest in participating or improving the quality of their readers (as fundamentally they don't believe there's a business case for it). Those who work for publishes lament this endlessly, because lack of software support for certain features limits the quality of what they can publish. (And note for several major publishers their print editions are nowadays typeset from HTML/CSS using Prince.)
- atomwaffel 8y ago
  > And note for several major publishers their print editions are nowadays typeset from HTML/CSS using Prince. Interesting, having played around with wkhtmltopdf and Puppeteer, I had no idea any HTML-to-PDF renderers would be a viable option for publishers, but their examples are pretty impressive – definitely more than any e-readers manage! > as fundamentally they don't believe there's a business case for it And they’re probably right. I imagine very few people avoid e-books because of their typographical shortcomings. The arguments I hear against them tend to be on a more fundamental level (‘I prefer to be able to feel the paper’), and even people like me who do notice bad typography put up with e-readers. Publishers meanwhile may well care about their readers’ experience, but they can’t afford not to sell digital copies. So I understand that typography probably doesn’t make much of a difference to the bottom line of e-reader manufacturers, I just wish the bottom line weren’t the only incentive for large companies.
  - gsnedders 8y ago
    Prince is purpose-built for paged media and non-real-time rendering, so it can make plenty of performance tradeoffs that neither WebKit (and wkhtmltopdf) nor Blink (and Puppeteer) can, along with having far more engineering resources caring about the paged media case and edge-cases there. It's not cheap, but if you're a publisher I imagine the cost savings of not having to deal with multiple formats (one for print, one for digital) outweighs that many times over, provided you can get good enough results. I do wonder if any publishers will get into the e-reader space, especially on the software-only side. But it's not an easy market to get into and the costs are pretty high, and I think both of us are dubious as to how much any user actually cares.

a13n 8y ago

What do you expect it to do differently in that case?

dcuthbertson 8y ago
How about proper widow/orphan control?
bhaak 8y ago
This is a problem since printed books exist. There are lots of different options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans#Guidelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans#Guidelines The kindle also doesn't support proper kerning. Sorry if I told you that and you can't unsee it now. But you can install 3rd party reading software on jailbroken kindles like koreader that fixes some of the deficiencies.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  And we have the orphans and widows properties in CSS that provide some control across fragments, though they're not supported in Firefox (or EdgeHTML, for however much longer that matters).
- UsernameProxy 8y ago
  I was just trying to find _koreader_ on the Play Store, but am not having much luck. What's the actual name, please?
  - bhaak 8y ago
    I don't know if it's in the Play Store but you can download the APK directly from GitHub: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases Although Koreader has been originally developed for e-ink devices. I'm not sure how well it has been optimized for normal tablet screens.
    - UsernameProxy 8y ago
      Great - thanks for the link.

gsnedders 8y ago

I know several people on the publishing side around the digital publishing groups around the W3C, but a large part of the problem is most of the companies making the popular readers (both those with strict hardware/software integration, like most eInk readers, and those without, like most phone/tablet/computer-based readers) simply have no interest in participating or improving the quality of their readers (as fundamentally they don't believe there's a business case for it). Those who work for publishes lament this endlessly, because lack of software support for certain features limits the quality of what they can publish. (And note for several major publishers their print editions are nowadays typeset from HTML/CSS using Prince.)

atomwaffel 8y ago
> And note for several major publishers their print editions are nowadays typeset from HTML/CSS using Prince. Interesting, having played around with wkhtmltopdf and Puppeteer, I had no idea any HTML-to-PDF renderers would be a viable option for publishers, but their examples are pretty impressive – definitely more than any e-readers manage! > as fundamentally they don't believe there's a business case for it And they’re probably right. I imagine very few people avoid e-books because of their typographical shortcomings. The arguments I hear against them tend to be on a more fundamental level (‘I prefer to be able to feel the paper’), and even people like me who do notice bad typography put up with e-readers. Publishers meanwhile may well care about their readers’ experience, but they can’t afford not to sell digital copies. So I understand that typography probably doesn’t make much of a difference to the bottom line of e-reader manufacturers, I just wish the bottom line weren’t the only incentive for large companies.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  Prince is purpose-built for paged media and non-real-time rendering, so it can make plenty of performance tradeoffs that neither WebKit (and wkhtmltopdf) nor Blink (and Puppeteer) can, along with having far more engineering resources caring about the paged media case and edge-cases there. It's not cheap, but if you're a publisher I imagine the cost savings of not having to deal with multiple formats (one for print, one for digital) outweighs that many times over, provided you can get good enough results. I do wonder if any publishers will get into the e-reader space, especially on the software-only side. But it's not an easy market to get into and the costs are pretty high, and I think both of us are dubious as to how much any user actually cares.