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Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

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Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#91

Post by ben_w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
nosianu wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But zooming scales the fonts only. For pixel images you have the pixels that are in it and that's it. Scaling those either up or down does not produce good text. Now I'm just waiting for the inevitable "AI image scaler" that handles text inside images.

> Now I'm just waiting for the inevitable "AI image scaler" that handles text inside images. I'm surprised this isn't a thing already, as it seems doable with what people called "AI" 20 years ago. I mean, unless some unusual/non-default font was used, upscaling text on an image should be almost trivial. Ligatures notwithstanding, "printed letters" have a fixed shape, so: 1. Identify the typeface, size, weight, etc. b…

It's definitely possible, as Google Translate (and before it, Word Lens) does exactly that.

Word Lens was demonstrated in late 2010.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#92

Post by wakeupcall »

warpspin wrote: post #70

While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there's also simply the deeper story here, that "the web's" handling of paged media and the CSS paged media specs (to which his epub problem is related) is a never ending shitshow. Not only for epubs, for everybody who actually wants to print to real paper, too, ideally with a working cross browser solution. Mistake is largely not in the specs, but…

Some months ago I wanted to format/print some documents, and given the existing tooling I had I decided to try the html->pdf route. I fully agree is a shitshow. The way things break across pages is hard to fix even when hand-tuning the html itself (not just by working it around with css) to avoid content being cut across margins and pages no matter what. I've found chrome to be "less bad", but still unusable. Column handling is even a bigger joke.

In the end I exported the document to libreoffice, and got something way more usable in a few hours just by editing the styles than whatever I was able to do in days of fiddling with html+browser.

iBooks on apple might get a pass as it doesn't need to paginate, but truth be told it seems that epub/ebooks and ereaders in general are being targeted at novels and romance, where form factor, typesetting and formatting doesn't matter that much.

I have access to ebooks through my local library and there's no way I would use, let alone buy, any technical ebook.

Not to mention, I've seen a steady average decline in the quality of printed media in general over the last ~15 years. A lot less attention is put in the typesetting and layout. Even the print quality itself is lower, which I think is due to the smaller and cheaper print runs being done now also for more popular titles.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#93

Post by eleveriven »

Ma8ee wrote: post #65
Tepix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's the opposite. Whenever i have the choice, i want EPUB, not PDF. The problem with PDFs is that you don't have a device that is the same size as the original page size in most cases.

It depends on what kind of book it is. Fiction EPUB all day. Technical books with figures, tables or code listings, PDF!

Exactly! EPUBs are great for novels or anything you just want to read line-by-line

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#94

Post by eleveriven »

messe wrote: post #85
carlosjobim wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One question: Why do people make PDFs in A4 format? Wouldn't it make better sense to start making them in A5 or A6, so that they could be better read on e-readers, phones, and on part of a computer screen (which is landscape oriented)?

What's even worse is the PDFs in Letter format.

Constant zooming and scrolling just to read a single page

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#95

Post by eleveriven »

donatj wrote: post #88
zargon wrote: post #55

Another frustrating thing with ebooks is that you can't get them in PDF format any more. So much time is spent making a nicely fomatted hardcopy edition, then the ebook is only available as a terribly auto-converted epub that throws away all the layout and style. Particularly cookbooks, as well as anything technical, I just can't stand how lazy, ugly, and difficult to read the epubs are. All the tooling already exist…

I agree, I absolutely hate reading basically everything other than novels/non-fiction narratives in epub. All the work they did laying out the pages is just thrown away! Trying to read any sort of instructional book as an epub is straight up infuriating. I work for a children's reading platform, and the book publishers universally send us PDFs of everything. We have a bespoke system to convert the PDFs into SVG for h…

It really shows that when there’s care taken with formatting, it makes a huge difference in how engaging and accessible the material is

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#96

Post by eleveriven »

WalterBright wrote: post #25

If I was designing an ebook reader, the display would look like a book's display. None of the ereaders I know of do this. 1. Have a background image that looks like paper. No, a solid white or tan background doesn't look like paper. Paper has imperfections in it, dirt, a grain, and you can faintly see the other side of the page. Except for the latter, this is easy to achieve. Simply scan a bunch of blank pages, and u…

Adding a touch of imperfection

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#97

Post by spookie »

wakeupcall wrote: post #92
warpspin wrote: post #70

While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there's also simply the deeper story here, that "the web's" handling of paged media and the CSS paged media specs (to which his epub problem is related) is a never ending shitshow. Not only for epubs, for everybody who actually wants to print to real paper, too, ideally with a working cross browser solution. Mistake is largely not in the specs, but…

Some months ago I wanted to format/print some documents, and given the existing tooling I had I decided to try the html->pdf route. I fully agree is a shitshow. The way things break across pages is hard to fix even when hand-tuning the html itself (not just by working it around with css) to avoid content being cut across margins and pages no matter what. I've found chrome to be "less bad", but still unusable. Column…

Paper quality in general has seen quite a decline as well.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#98

Post by spookie »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #90
jll29 wrote: post #20

Not to mention the ugly/unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust. Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it's automated by people who lack the specialized knowledge, or for whom it is not a priority (quarter century old bug reports, really?) suggests that in 2025, you should still avoid ebooks if you care about quality and aesthetics. This is a shame beca…

If this is is still a problem thirty years after the invention of the web, then I say: So much the worse for mathematical notation. In the future, mathematical ideas will be expressed in other ways.

Mathematical notation, even when considering all its faults, won't be easy to replace.

Simple math, maybe. But, for anything complex, any other symbol would require completely different ways of being expressed, if your aim is to make it more readable for newcomers that is.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#99

Post by vintagedave »

Another Safari CSS failure for typography is drop-cap support, which is where the first letter of a paragraph is drawn larger and in capitals. It's a year since I looked at this, but the comments explaining the weird CSS say:

> This was actually remarkably difficult to get right: the trick is setting line-height and height to The same CSS (https://daveon.design/manuscript-vintagedave.css) applies typographical sentence spacing to sentences within a paragraph, which you can see on any article, eg: https://daveon.design/what-are-you-optimising-for.html

I would love to see more CSS support for _typography_: not letter spacing, but actual typographical layout. The article is dead-on accurate when it says we still can't reach what was normal in layout for six centuries.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#100

Post by spookie »

Skeime wrote: post #51
WalterBright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

I have not once seen a formulae-as-images solution that I would consider acceptable, aesthetically. Common problems are: - It almost impossible to align the baseline of the formula to the baseline of the surrounding text. - Often, images are only used for "complex" formulae, while simple ones are implemented using normal typesetting. This resolves the baseline issue for simple formulae, but now the fonts between simp…

Furthermore, you would need to express them in text anyways for accessibility.
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