Sony or Nook Touch

[Prestidigitweeze]

And character assassination is useful on a comparison thread because?

This has been going on for a week and it doesn't make any of you look good.

Don't get me wrong: You're knowledgeable people and your speculation, discussions and help are valuable.

But how long are you going to tear at one another's personalities? If I wanted to see that, I'd pay more attention to politics, where the spectacle of personality rape occurs with soul-numbing frequency.

I made the same mistake myself a few weeks back, so I'm not being superior. I'm trying to be empathetic.

JSWolf made an interesting comment a few posts back about the Nook ST's font rendering engine being inferior to that of the Sony x50.

Do either of you find that to be true? I'll try to take another look this afternoon myself, when I'll be near a B&N store. Truthfully, I was so amazed by the ST's font choices that I probably didn't pay enough atte[n]tion.

[ST-One]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

JSWolf made an interesting comment a few posts back about the Nook ST's font rendering engine being inferior to that of the Sony x50.

Do either of you find that to be true? I'll try to take another look this afternoon myself, when I'll be near a B&N store. Truthfully, I was so amazed by the ST's font choices that I probably didn't pay enough attetion.

I guess some of the issues with the fonts could be related to the 6-page-refresh (I'd like to have the option to customize that).
I just browsed through a few pages of one of the recently released Star Wars books and the Charis-font (under publishers defaults) looked fine - at least to me.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

JSWolf made an interesting comment a few posts back about the Nook ST's font rendering engine being inferior to that of the Sony x50.

Do either of you find that to be true? I'll try to take another look this afternoon myself, when I'll be near a B&N store. Truthfully, I was so amazed by the ST's font choices that I probably didn't pay enough attention.

Put an ePub on your Sony that uses Charis. One of the Star Wars ePub samples from B&N would do fine and the sample does not have DRM. Find one of the new Star Wars ePub samples and load it on the nook.

This way you can compare the same exact embedded font and you should find that the Sony renders so much nicer then the nook. The nook just doesn't get the strokes right so you have uneven strokes and some of the strokes are too think and it's very noticeable. It looked like a different font to me. I happen to have had a book that used Charis and used a Star Wars sample that uses Charis. So my comparison showed the flaw of the nook's font rendering engine.

I took a look at Charis using ADE for Windows and I did not see that the Sony was doing anything to force it to look better. I did not see any lines that were thin.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Put an ePub on your Sony that uses Charis. One of the Star Wars ePub samples from B&N would do fine and the sample does not have DRM. Find one of the new Star Wars ePub samples and load it on the nook.

This way you can compare the same exact embedded font and you should find that the Sony renders so much nicer then the nook. The nook just doesn't get the strokes right so you have uneven strokes and some of the strokes are too think and it's very noticeable. It looked like a different font to me. I happen to have had a book that used Charis and used a Star Wars sample that uses Charis. So my comparison showed the flaw of the nook's font rendering engine.

I took a look at Charis using ADE for Windows and I did not see that the Sony was doing anything to force it to look better. I did not see any lines that were thin.

It would be nice to have a picture comparison. Does anyone on MR have a Sony AND an N2?

I wonder, though, if it won't depend on the N2 model, like the ghosting? I've seen pictures of the ghosting that were just...WTF. I would not be able to read that at all. And yet other users have said that their units have not ghosted at all. Could the font rendering issues be similarly unit-based? I'm not up on the technical details enough to know.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

It would be nice to have a picture comparison. Does anyone on MR have a Sony AND an N2?

I wonder, though, if it won't depend on the N2 model, like the ghosting? I've seen pictures of the ghosting that were just...WTF. I would not be able to read that at all. And yet other users have said that their units have not ghosted at all. Could the font rendering issues be similarly unit-based? I'm not up on the technical details enough to know.

It's not a ghosting issue. The unit I tried at B&N did not show ghosting.

I would think it would not be individual unit based, but the only way I can be sure is to go back to B&N and use a different unit. I'll do that sometime. When I do, I'll take a photo of both the nook and the Sony using my cellphone (cheap shit crappy ass camera on an iPhone 3G). I don't think B&N would allow me to bring my better camera into the shop to take photos. But for now, unless someone says otherwise, I'm saying no to the nook.

[jocampo]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But for now, unless someone says otherwise, I'm saying no to the nook.

For some reason that does not surprise me ...

[boswd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Put an ePub on your Sony that uses Charis. One of the Star Wars ePub samples from B&N would do fine and the sample does not have DRM. Find one of the new Star Wars ePub samples and load it on the nook.

This way you can compare the same exact embedded font and you should find that the Sony renders so much nicer then the nook. The nook just doesn't get the strokes right so you have uneven strokes and some of the strokes are too think and it's very noticeable. It looked like a different font to me. I happen to have had a book that used Charis and used a Star Wars sample that uses Charis. So my comparison showed the flaw of the nook's font rendering engine.

I took a look at Charis using ADE for Windows and I did not see that the Sony was doing anything to force it to look better. I did not see any lines that were thin.

Dude you are on some bizarre crusade about this font to bash on the nook.
Look anyone who's been on this forum regularly knows you LOVE the Sony's as much if not more than I love the nooks.
But the difference is to me the Sony has it's share of faults but I'm not on some lunatic crusade to tell people not buy because it's faults and hanging out in the Sony subforum on some bizarre soapbox.

but man you are going alll nuttso on the nook board about some crazy font and telling everyone not to buy the nook because of it.

I don't JSWolf seems to be in the number of threads crusading about some font thing just seem a little over the top to pimp your Sony brand.

just sayin

[delphin]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Put an ePub on your Sony that uses Charis. . . .

I took a look at Charis using ADE for Windows and I did not see that the Sony was doing anything to force it to look better. I did not see any lines that were thin.

Strange that you would hold Sony up as the paragon of font rendering when there have been so many complaints about Sony's poor font choices on the PRS-x50 readers.

Like the HIDEOUS font that Sony provides as THE ONLY OPTION for all .txt files.

Load up a .txt file on your Sony and you will see EXACTLY THE SAME ISSUES that you described for the Charis font on the Nook.

On my Sony, while viewing .txt or LRF files with the default font, the descender on the lower case letter 'g' turns into a hairline that is barely even visible because of EXACTLY the kind of 'thick line, thin line' problem you described.

Yes, EPUBs with Charis SIL embedded look a little better, thanks to ADEs font rendering on the Sony (thanks I suspect, to Adobe, NOT Sony) but even with EPUBs there are some fairly significant issues and limitations, thanks to Sony, that don't exist on most of their competitors.

- Like Sony's not providing a nice selection of user settable fonts like the Nooks.

- And Sony's poor choice for the single available default font.

- And Sony's not providing a way for users to load their own fonts onto the reader and set them as the default, which at least would have allowed them to fix the above issues (it took Kobo about a week to respond to user requests and add this feature, Sony has had YEARS and has done NOTHING)

As far as your complaints about Charis SIL's rendering on the Nook goes . . .

YES - Charis SIL does have large weight differences for different strokes in the font.

For example the left upward stroke of the letter 'W' is about TWICE as wide as the corresponding right side upward stroke.

This makes it challenging to render at smaller font sizes without some strokes becoming too thin, and it is indeed the responsibility of the font rendering engine to try to deal with this.

One compromise is to decrease the stroke weight differences as the font gets smaller, and to help with this, the font has 'hinting' and 'instructing' codes built in, but not all font rendering engines respond to this info, and those that do sometimes will still render differently at smaller font sizes.

I have looked at the Nook STR, and did NOT find that the font rendering was all that bad, but the early Kindles had some issues with font anti-aliasing and rendering, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Nook STR could also be improved by a tweak or two.

I suspect that B&N may be just using the default Android font rendering, and it may not yet have been fully optimized for eInk (since there are few eInk Android devices other than the Nook STR).

Either way, since Charis SIL has indeed been used as an embedded font in a large number of commercially published books in EPUB format, I wouldn't worry about this too much, because if tweaking is needed, I am sure that B&N will respond. The early Nook's got new software updates fairly quickly when changes were needed.

On the other hand, I wouldn't make any bets on your odds of having Sony release an update to fix the default font readability issues, or the lack of other font options, on the PRS-x50 readers.

Based on Sony's past performance, the odds wouldn't be in your favor.

[anamardoll]

I agree that Sony should have included more font options, but I believe JS Wolf was talking about the rendering, not the options. In which case, one can legitimately point out that it's relatively easy to add new fonts to the Sony reader (I even have a blog tutorial! Yay!), but it's NOT relatively easy to make the N2 rendering better.*

* Assuming that JS Wolf is right that the N2 rendering is poor. I have no experience with the device and therefore no opinion to offer.

[John F]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Put an ePub on your Sony that uses Charis. One of the Star Wars ePub samples from B&N would do fine and the sample does not have DRM. Find one of the new Star Wars ePub samples and load it on the nook.

This way you can compare the same exact embedded font and you should find that the Sony renders so much nicer then the nook. The nook just doesn't get the strokes right so you have uneven strokes and some of the strokes are too think and it's very noticeable. It looked like a different font to me. I happen to have had a book that used Charis and used a Star Wars sample that uses Charis. So my comparison showed the flaw of the nook's font rendering engine.

I took a look at Charis using ADE for Windows and I did not see that the Sony was doing anything to force it to look better. I did not see any lines that were thin.

I would suggest that anyone interested in this problem to look at the nook installed fonts. If you change any formatting option (like font size) on the nook, you will be using one of the built in fonts (I think). I would guess the average user is going to be using one of the Nook installed fonts?

[ST-One]

Originally Posted by John F

I would suggest that anyone interested in this problem to look at the nook installed fonts. If you change any formatting option (like font size) on the nook, you will be using one of the built in fonts (I think). I would guess the average user is going to be using one of the Nook installed fonts?

Personally, I prefer the Amasis-font, but I've seen no problems with the embedded Charis-font.

Quite honestly, I don't know what he's talking about.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ST-One

Personally, I prefer the Amasis-font, but I've seen no problems with the embedded Charis-font.

Quite honestly, I don't know what he's talking about.

The strokes of the font (Charis) are uneven and some of them are just too thin. So to me, it's not a good look on the screen. The problem then becomes that if you override it because you want a different font, you also override the ePub's margins and line spacing which may be what you want.

[delphin]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I agree that Sony should have included more font options, but I believe JS Wolf was talking about the rendering, not the options. In which case, one can legitimately point out that it's relatively easy to add new fonts to the Sony reader (I even have a blog tutorial! Yay!), but it's NOT relatively easy to make the N2 rendering better.*

* Assuming that JS Wolf is right that the N2 rendering is poor. I have no experience with the device and therefore no opinion to offer.

Let me see if I can shed some more light on this, because I think all this talk about the Sony and Nook having different 'font rendering engines' is completely off base.

I mentioned before that it's a pretty good guess that B&N is using the standard Android font rendering engine in the Nook Simple Touch (which is based on freetype). This is a good bet, because the freetype rendering engine is as good as any on the planet right now and is used in Android and virtually ALL Linux distributions, so I doubt that B&N would have found any reason to look elsewhere.

Now, if you check your Sony's PDF user manual on page 119 you will find a short acknowledgment that 'freetype' is also used in the Sony. (freetype is one of the GPL licensed free opensource software technologies that Sony 'borrowed' [ripped off] for the PRS-650)

The freetype rendering engine is very sophisticated and has a lot of features, and therefore a lot of options that can be tweaked.

Chances are, that any differences that JS saw were simply caused by freetype being set up with slightly different options enabled.

The N2 developers may have fallen into the trap of enabling 'strong hinting' in freetype, which is sometimes recommend for black and white monochrome displays.

"Hinting" was conceived to help the font rendering engine figure out how to move pixels around to keep the font legible at smaller type sizes back in the old days with 1bit/pixel monochrome displays.

The problem is that phrase 'black and white monochrome,' is very slippery in English.

For example, when you see an old style television image or photograph described as 'black and white', what you were really looking at was a gray-scale image, not one made up of only two values, black and white.

It turns out that the above advice about 'strong hinting', is ONLY applicable to displays that can truly only render two values - black or white - NOT to gray-scale displays.

Modern displays all use multiple bits/pixel, and this allows fonts to also be smoothed and made more readable at smaller sizes via another technique called 'anti-aliasing' (by introducing intermediate brightness pixel levels around the edges.)

The font rendering engine deals with the complicated task of shrinking a font down and rendering it, by using a combination of 'hinting' (moving pixels around to better positions) and 'anti-aliasing' (intermediate value pixels around the edges).

The eInk displays in both the Sony and Nook allow 16 level gray scale which is more than enough for effective anti-aliasing of fonts, so for these devices, the best font rendering will involve some combination of very light 'hinting' and 'anti-aliasing'.

Telling freetype to use heavier 'hinting' gives thiner higher contrast characters, but tends to change the shapes of letters slightly as pixels are moved around to more optimum positions by the hinting algorithm.

Relying on light hinting plus anti-aliasing gives fonts that are much truer to shape, but which are slightly lower in contrast at light stroke weights, and softer around the edges.

And if this isn't confusing enough, to add to the confusion, there are variations in how freetype does hinting . . .

Until recently, there were software patent issues with the freetype rendering engine being able to legally use the special 'hinting' bytecode that is embedded within a truetype font, so the freetype developers instead came up with a very sophisticated 'auto-hinter' to move the font's pixels around automatically at smaller type sizes without using the font's embedded hinting info.

In 2010 all the patent restrictions on hinting bytecode expired, so now the freetype rendering engine is technically able to use the hinting bytecode included with most truetype fonts by the font's developers (but ironically sometimes the auto-hinter still works better, so it's still available as well).

So, there are a LOT of options . . .

Should we use Strong hinting, medium, or light?

Should the hinting use the fonts official hinting bytecode, or the auto-hinting algorithm built into freetype?

How should anti-aliasing be handled?

. . . as you can see, this gets a little complicated.

A little complicated, but not TOO complicated . . .

So if some of the freetype options need to be tweaked, I am sure that B&N will figure it out.

And if not, we ARE talking about Android - and the Nook STR HAS BEEN ROOTED - so if necessary, you should be able to change the font rendering settings yourself.

[ST-One]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The strokes of the font (Charis) are uneven and some of them are just too thin. So to me, it's not a good look on the screen.

Yes, to you. And you go on and on and on and on about it.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem then becomes that if you override it because you want a different font, you also override the ePub's margins and line spacing which may be what you want.

How is that a problem?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ST-One

How is that a problem?

It's a problem because you override font, line-height, and margin. But hat if you want the margin as is and a different font? You can't have both. You get a different font, different margins, and maybe different line height. It would be good to be able to just override one thing and leave the rest as is.