[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk>]

Hi Al,

> I was disappointed the world tolerates the fugly typography of web
> pages.  Hundreds of years of readability knowledge thrown out the
> window.

PDFs of books have declined too, and with that the book held in the
hand.  It's as if no aesthetic judging of each page's appearance has
occurred; whatever the program produces is correct.  Probably because
many books are about technologies with little lifespan; either it will
wane or version 2.0 will need a new book.  Books on topics with a longer
life are dragged down.

Full justification is still often used.  No breaks around the start/stop
parenthetical em dash causes the very long ‘word’ to start the next
line; the line before becomes 40% space.  Sentences which start ‘I’ end
a line.  Or page.  Sans serif used so that ‘I’ is as thin as can be and
the font, to my eyes, generally lacks flow.

When there's the choice, I skim the PDF and if it's good, go with that.
Otherwise, I pluck for the worse-looking EPUB, HTML under the covers,
because I can unpack it with bsdtar(1), tinker with the HTML and CSS to
fix the worst of the appearance, and then return it to foo.epub for
reading.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.