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Kindle Page Layout and Typography
May 5, 2009 | 5:23 pm
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By Dennis Hays
The news I’m reading about the Kindle 2 seems to dwell on the contrast
issue; whether or not the type is easy to read. The gray background
and the non-black type has been the cause of many discussions.
One of the many fixes proposed is to change the font to a different
bold-faced font, blackening the type to make it easier to read. At the
time of this writing, changing the font requires a non-Amazon hack
that can be reversed.
I’ve thought about doing this, but there is a cost I’m not ready to
pay. If you change the font to all bold, what happens to intentional
bold type in books and documents, especially in-line words? If
everything is bold, then what happens to that which has been made bold
in the original document? I haven’t tested this, as I’m not ready yet
to change the default type-face.
Widows and Orphans
A more glaring problem is the Kindle’s inability to properly display
Widows and Orphans. A Widow, in typesetting, is when the last line of a paragraph appears at the top of the following page. 
An Orphan is the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page and the remaining text appears on the next page.
I’ll grant that for most people, this probably is not a concern. However, for me (and I hope others), this lack of proper typesetting takes me out of the story for a second.
As you can change the leading on the Kindle 2 (leading is also called line height or line spacing), the lines of text can vary, depending on what you set; Shift+ALT and a number (default is 3). As the text flow is re-created when setting the leading, more or less lines on a page appear, depending on the setting. No matter what setting you use, at some point in the book widows and orphans appear.
Modern word processors have settings for Widows and Orphans, either to toggle on or off, as in Microsoft Word. When on, at least two lines of text from a paragraph appear on a page. Other text creation engines have more liberal settings, where you can set the minimum number of paragraph lines on each page. Therefore, in word processors, the
program paginates to accommodate the settings. This, however, is with text creators, not readers. Readers, like the Kindle, must parse the full text flow displaying the optimum number of lines, fitting the virtual page. Unfortunately, the youth of the technology in the Kindle does not yet know how to determine Widows and Orphans.
Okay, I know this can’t be a major Kindle problem for most people; they probably are unaware this issue exists. So, while it’s not the type of issue forcing Kindle returns and it’s not on the scale of the plethora of contrast complaints, it does rank as an issue which can be fixed via version upgrade.
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Comments:
There are semi-bold fonts that are heavier than normal fonts but can still show a difference between bold and not-bold. Widows and orphans shouldn’t really be too hard to handle. The eleven-year-old tech in my eBookwise handles them fine with a CSS line.
Based on the Sony Reader ePub rendering, I’d say Adobe Digital Editions handles Widows and Orphans properly (although I haven’t attempted to override the default values with CSS). One item that may be worth noting: when not using a margin around the page, the gap generated at the bottom when avoiding Orphans and Widows looks pretty bad.
And, as Dhamu indicates, the “bolding” of text wouldn’t be an issue if we could easily install our own fonts to the device and/or override the document font.
Arghh, people are going to think I’m an Adobe shill…
Hyphenation is another very important issue from my point of view. I hate justified text without proper hyphenation.
Laying out a page for a book is not solely a technical issue, but is usually addressed by techies, so few book readers have the smarts to do it on the fly, probably because not much attention has been paid to the finer details. On the surface it seems simple, but there are almost infinite layers of complexity if you dare to delve deeper into kerning, line spacing, proper hyphenation, ligatures etc. It isn’t easy to distill several centuries of typographical best practice into rules that a programmer can apply.
Hopefully it will get better over time!
Christo: Well for a start, programmers could read The Elements of Typographic Style from Robert Bringhurst.
See the web version of Elements of Typographic Style . Tries to implement Bringhurst’s principles in CSS. Not sure which of these css rules apply to the css subset allowed by epub. For example, pagination and page breaks