Kindle Typography

[Gearhead]

If Amazon would switch on the text justification toggle that is hidden in the Kindle firmware, the reflow problem shown in the article at large fonts sizes would go away when the user selects left justification. Some readers, including myself, actually prefer left justified text.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

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.

In fairness, ebook readers have pretty wimpy CPUs, in order to avoid draining the battery. InDesign and TeX don't have to worry about such constraints. So a full-blown solution is probably not feasible on today's ereaders.

Did you know Amazon has a typography team in Cupertino, where Kindle is developed? There's a current job listing for someone to manage it. Hope they get someone good...

[ChaoZ]

Originally Posted by tomsem

In fairness, ebook readers have pretty wimpy CPUs, in order to avoid draining the battery. InDesign and TeX don't have to worry about such constraints. So a full-blown solution is probably not feasible on today's ereaders.

Did you know Amazon has a typography team in Cupertino, where Kindle is developed? There's a current job listing for someone to manage it. Hope they get someone good...

I don't buy this as an excuse. The Kindle has a 532mhz CPU. Quark and InDesign have been around for years (in Quark's case, decades) running on lesser processors. It doesn't require a metric ton of processing power to load in a set of rules on where text goes.

The problem is that Amazon: a) Has no such engine b) Doesn't know good typographic principles c) Doesn't deem it a priority d) A combination of all three.

[tomblond]

I wouldn't worry about that article; it's pretty awful, loaded with conjecture and errors. Here's just a sample of quotes that are simply wrong:

The resolution of E Ink technology is purportedly around 300 dpi.

It's 167ppi.

I am sure the crappiness of the image quality is due to the fact that with E Ink you have only black or white “pixel” molecules with which to render text or image, and so it doesn’t matter if you have 300 dpi, you still need some levels of grey in order to do proper anti-aliasing and image reproduction. (I bet the image format on the Kindle is BMP.)

Firstly, what are on earth are pixel molecules? Secondly, Kindles have 16 levels of grey, and third, BMPs are not supported. Not sure where the author got the notion that BMPs lack in quality, for devices such as the Kindle, it's the size they come out at that is the problem.

Really? I highly doubt that scanning is part of the process of getting a book on the Kindle.

Proves that the author just ranted for a thousand words and hit publish without researching or verifying his ridiculous claims.

The author is mostly criticising the conversion process, something that affects all ebook readers, not only the Kindle. The author very much reminds me of the people I detest in the graphics industry; the people that read a few books on 'good typography' and then feel qualified to rant about the 'abhorrent' state of modern typography, and how 'no one understands the rules of good typography!', pretending like they do themselves. Throw in a few technical words here and there, mention the Swiss once or twice and no one will notice.

Anyway, as for the criticism of Kindle's ebook format, TeX was not meant for literary work, and for that reason is no more mature a candidate than anything else. Amazon has a lot of money staked on getting the typography right, so I'm sure the people they hired to get around the problems know a lot more about the subject than any of us do.

And the idea of not allowing the resizing of text due the hyphenation issue is ridiculous. You really want Amazon to sacrifice accessibility and alienate it's visually impaired customers just to make self-professed type-geeks happy? No, good typography is about making text accessible and readable. By digitising books we now have the oppurtunity to make their content more accessible to everyone. To ask for this to be sacrificed for some comparatively trivial benefits of controlled hyphenation is clearly wrong.

Either way, so far they're doing a good job of it. There's the odd niggle here and there, but considering how short a time these things have been around, and the technical limitations they have to work with, it's obvious the developers know what they're doing. If the benefits of an ereader appeal to you, then I wouldn't let it concern you.

Cheers,
Tom

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ChaoZ

I don't buy this as an excuse. The Kindle has a 532mhz CPU.

For what its worth: MS Reader did good typography on even the earliest Pocket PCs running 200MHz ARM CPUs.
(Of course MS has quality typographical code that ran well on 8MHz 286s, back in the DOS days when they had to code their own printer drivers.)

It's not the CPU, since the software doesn't have to render the entire book at once, just the page being displayed. That should not require 1 GHz CPU unless you're talking JAVA. (And Kindle is raw Linux, no?)

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

For what its worth: MS Reader did good typography on even the earliest Pocket PCs running 200MHz ARM CPUs.
(Of course MS has quality typographical code that ran well on 8MHz 286s, back in the DOS days when they had to code their own printer drivers.)

It's not the CPU, since the software doesn't have to render the entire book at once, just the page being displayed. That should not require 1 GHz CPU unless you're talking JAVA. (And Kindle is raw Linux, no?)

The Kindle SDK at least is Java. But at least according to Oracle (Sun), Java is 'on par' with C/C++ for most applications. Nobody would use it on embedded systems if it weren't.

And ok, you've convinced me that CPU is not particularly a constraint here in terms of layout.

But a small screen is, particularly when using larger text sizes. It becomes impossible to even out all the white space when you cannot get the measure, point size, and leading in balance (because the user controls point size, and measure is fixed). Hyphenation can't help when these factors are out of balance.

There are a lot of things they can correct: why don't they permit line breaks after em dashes? Why not more image placement options? Why not allow a right margin to be set? At least they should bring it up to parity with ePub in terms of styling.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by tomsem

There are a lot of things they can correct:

Oh, no doubt about that.

Again, MS Reader works on 3-4 in screens and allows end-user font-sizing. But the first thing is it is true font-sizing, not zoom factors. This allows their kerning algorithms and font hints a chance to play out. You can do a fair amount of font up-sizing and not get rivers of white. Just load up MSReader on PC and check it out.

The thing to keep in mind with MS Reader is that the folks that did it at MS came from a typography background (not a cellphone background) and their intent was readability above all since they were working mostly with tiny QVGA screens.

One of the things Kindle and *other* readers need to copy is the way MS reader handles graphics: it has no size restrictions. What it does is automatically scale the graphics to fit the screen and then you can zoom in and pan to your heart's content. I've created LIT files with massive images (maps, on occasion) that take up most of a 1200x1600 portrait monitor and display fine on PDAs and cellphones.

It's early in the evolution of ebook readers, I know, but there is way too much focus on hardware and nowhere near enough on software.

My Kindle at least has the virtue of stability, which my first eink reader didn't, but they need to pay more attention to font support and get better rendering algorithms.

I know Amazon has a phobia about licensing stuff and paying royalties but at some point they need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Cough up some dough!

And, by god, let us read with something other than Caecillia!