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Ebook typography
Inspired by a discussion at the Mobileread forums; decided it really should go here. In a thread about ebook formats, typography was mentioned. (It always is, in the PDF-vs-epub filetype wars.) And while a lot of us who read onscreen are prone to saying, "who needs fancy typography? Just gimme text!" ... typography doesn't have to be "fancy" to be useful and important. It was brought up that typography was developed over hundreds of years, to be what's easiest for the human eye to read, and that ebooks, being fed to those same eyes, are going to need to use a lot of those standards. So I started thinking:
Conventions of typography & layout were designed for the limitations of paper. While a lot of them apply to ebooks, some don't.
Margins, for example. I don't need a half-inch of white space around my ebook text, because I have an ebook reader--my fingers won't cover the text while I'm holding it. I don't need page numbers built into the book, so margins aren't necessary for that, either. Don't need chapter headers at the tops of the pages (I gather this is a printer's convention, rather than one designed for readers); it might be nice, but also might be done very differently from the print methods.
The cover's not going to be torn off to return the book; I don't need a picture cover *and* a text-based title page. Don't need text to give me information that's in the book's metadata, or at least, don't need it at the same level of prominence that's provided for print.
Ebooks being read on light-emitting devices are going to need different typography standards than print books. And we're not seeing any signs that light-emitting screens are going to go away. Sans-serif is often easier to read, especially at lower DPI, on a light-emitting screen. DPI is going to drastically change what fonts are most readable, and DPI isn't going to stop being a concern anytime soon.
Print typography has always had problems with large text, both because it just costs a lot more to print extra pages, and because fonts & layouts don't scale upwards precisely. Ebook typography is going to need to deal with both tiny-text and huge-text options, and we'll need new standards for both of those.
Reflow. Print doesn't deal with reflow options; ebooks will have to. Most of 'em do okay--but features like "images with captions" will need standards that haven't been established yet. So far, only a few ebook reading programs cope with this, and they all do it badly. (Except for PDF viewers that are entirely page-view based. Which is still "badly;" zooming in and scrolling around a page sucks.)
For the most part--almost anything will work for novels. It's when you get into nonfic with diagrams or charts, news stories with photos-and-captions, non-linear text (plays, quizzes, schedules), or heavily-artistic layouts (like many magazines, or gaming books) that typography starts to really matter. And the lack of ebook typographical standards is part of why none of those types of content have taken off in ebook forms, while novels are selling very well.
Conventions of typography & layout were designed for the limitations of paper. While a lot of them apply to ebooks, some don't.
Margins, for example. I don't need a half-inch of white space around my ebook text, because I have an ebook reader--my fingers won't cover the text while I'm holding it. I don't need page numbers built into the book, so margins aren't necessary for that, either. Don't need chapter headers at the tops of the pages (I gather this is a printer's convention, rather than one designed for readers); it might be nice, but also might be done very differently from the print methods.
The cover's not going to be torn off to return the book; I don't need a picture cover *and* a text-based title page. Don't need text to give me information that's in the book's metadata, or at least, don't need it at the same level of prominence that's provided for print.
Ebooks being read on light-emitting devices are going to need different typography standards than print books. And we're not seeing any signs that light-emitting screens are going to go away. Sans-serif is often easier to read, especially at lower DPI, on a light-emitting screen. DPI is going to drastically change what fonts are most readable, and DPI isn't going to stop being a concern anytime soon.
Print typography has always had problems with large text, both because it just costs a lot more to print extra pages, and because fonts & layouts don't scale upwards precisely. Ebook typography is going to need to deal with both tiny-text and huge-text options, and we'll need new standards for both of those.
Reflow. Print doesn't deal with reflow options; ebooks will have to. Most of 'em do okay--but features like "images with captions" will need standards that haven't been established yet. So far, only a few ebook reading programs cope with this, and they all do it badly. (Except for PDF viewers that are entirely page-view based. Which is still "badly;" zooming in and scrolling around a page sucks.)
For the most part--almost anything will work for novels. It's when you get into nonfic with diagrams or charts, news stories with photos-and-captions, non-linear text (plays, quizzes, schedules), or heavily-artistic layouts (like many magazines, or gaming books) that typography starts to really matter. And the lack of ebook typographical standards is part of why none of those types of content have taken off in ebook forms, while novels are selling very well.
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For non-fic, it becomes more important, especially for reference works. I note that nonfic/reference ebooks are still in their infancy; we haven't sorted out how to make those work well. TOC issues are only part of that.
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Some ebooks come with *exactly* the same content as the pbook--including the colophon saying which fonts are used, and the location where it was supposedly printed. Or a note that it was printed on recycled paper.
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I've got editing tricks that sometimes let me read the PDFs without sizing them up ('cos that sometimes scrambles the layout badly, and sometimes the font is then too big to be comfortable), but they involve Acrobat Pro and sometimes other software. If I'm really interested, I'll save the thing out to Word and reformat it entirely for the small screen.
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I have access to Acrobat Pro at work, though, so I might try playing around with that and seeing what I can get out of it. Thanks.
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When I'm formatting for print, I tend to use two columns, like I did for the TWC Vol 1 PDF. It's tolerable onscreen, and very readable on paper.
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I need some kind of a chapter break, though. It's very disconcerting to discover, from one line to the next, that the action has shifted, or the POV has changed, and to have to make the mental shift. I'm used to chapter breaks.
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Not all ebooks are *designed* with chapter breaks, sigh. But that's a matter of poor formatting, not a tech limitation.
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There really should be an ebook stylebook created for publishers.