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Web browsers and proper book rendering don’t mix
June 11, 2009 | 3:26 pm
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By Paul Biba
I was put on to this fascinating article by Roger Sperberg. After reading it I went back and started to read all of Bill Hill’s blog posts. They are completely engrossing. Not only does he know the technology, he can also explain it – a rare talent. Read the whole thing and learn a lot.
As my online friend Richard Fink surmised, I was unable to resist making some experiments to try reproducing Tanya’s illustrated book on the Web.
If you read the comments on my previous post, you’ll see also that Roger Sperberg asked a key question: “Do you think that ebooks — even ones on ereaders that share rendering engines with browsers, like Bookworm — will make more headway on (readability) than the web in general?”
I’m sorry to have to say that the answer is that I’m certain readers will do better – at least the ones that don’t share rendering engines with browsers – and that the Web cannot become a real platform for publishing while the final display of book content for the reader is at the mercy of those different rendering engines, because they destroy any hope of consistency for publishers – even using standard markup.
It’s a sad fact that increasingly-popular Web standards are no help to the online book publisher at all. To test this, I was careful to use only Web-standards HTML and CSS3, and validate it with the W3C’s tools. …
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Comments:
Maybe I don’t get the point, but for what he tried to accomplish he should have used PDF.
Osrandil has it right. He wants to reproduce the printed page exactly. He should be using PDF.
If he does want to use HTML, he shouldn’t be using horrid double column javascript (hardly “standard HTML and CSS3″). He should have been using CSS float-right for the image.
As for mixing absolute point sizes and pixel dimensions – ugh. I suspect he’s made the assumption that 1pt == 1px, which is definitely not true in all situations.
There is much of this attempted reinvention going on to circumvent the *cue ominous music* DREADED PDF.
Get a reader that reads PDF, for cryin’ out loud.
and what ebook reader does not default to a format thats even worsely parsed across platforms then html? epub is html mobi is an old version of html, azw is based on mobi so this leaves PDF doesnt it?
His problem is that he is treating the web as if it was pdf, this is btw what i was able to do in 5 minutes playing http://dudsen.dk/misc/book.png
had i had the correct fonts installed i would probably have gotten what he was after.
It can be done if you actually understand your limitations but browsers are never going to put a author in full control of the entire experience. the browser mostly looks like the user want it to those days, and definately not like the web page wanted W3C have always rejected proposals to make that happen.
ohh and btw the lack of perfect formatting control were the main reason wry aol and MSN were going to have taken over the internet by now.
Actually, Bill Hill is consistently wrong concerning anything at all that uses HTML+CSS, including ePub books. He wants Web sites and E-books to look like magazine layouts (or to have the exact design he demands in all circumstances).
The old saying comes to mind: “Freedom of the press belongs to those that own one.”
Very last century.
And very out of touch with modern reality.
On the web and in proper ebook readers the ultimate word in presentation belongs to the reader; font face and size, line spacing and columns, those are decisions that *properly* belong to the consumer.
Readability is in the eye of the beholder and in a world flooded with alternatives and drowning in channels, information is not a gift from the publishing gods that has to be taken as they deem fit.
Electronic publishing is *not* about faking ink on paper; it is about making information in all its forms accessible.
Those who believe appearances matter more than the substance of the message are headed for a very harsh crash landing.
Yes.
There are things an e-book coder can and should manipulate for *some* aesthetic, but (big but) you have to work within the limitations of the software and the devices themselves.
People choose those devices for a reason. The reason is they don’t care what it looks like on paper or they woulda bought it on paper.
What Felix said. In spades, hearts, diamonds, green clovers, and little yellow moons.
“It’s a sad fact that increasingly-popular Web standards are no help to the online book publisher at all.”
The fact that he thought that he could use the web to try and replicate EXACTLY an item from a static medium such as a book indicates how clueless he was to begin with.
Given his bona fides listed in his “About Me” blurb on his site I’m stunned he thought this was even worthy of attempting.
The more I think about this, the more I’m reminded about the early days of the automobile industry:
In the very early days (and at the high end, well into the 30′s) many of the early manufacturers contracted with established carriage builders to design and build their vehicles’ bodies. As time went on the manufacturers started to realize that automobiles were *not* really horseless carriages but were an entirely new class of transportation. In the process they realized they didn’t need carriage builders to design their vehicle bodies and that, in fact, they could make a better/cheaper/more popular product if they did the design themselves.
People like to believe their skills and talents are valuable and nobody likes to accept that their skills are anything but current and relevant. But times change. And the added-value equation for electronic media skews very differently from the print media era. Accesibility ruless in the new era. Accessibility and user choice.
Ebooks without question need at least a modicum of typographic and presentation formatting skill but that skill belongs in the display application not in the file or even the file format specification.
My expectation is that now that ebook readers are becoming a true consumer product the industry leaders will be the ones that offer the consumer the best experience. And in modern terms, that means giving consumers what they are used to: control. All it takes is one supplier doing it…
And consumer control means that if consumers want to read their books in Comic Book Sans, no amount of teeth grinding by professionals is going to prevent it.
The times they are changing, not for the first time.
As somebody said: “this has happened before and it will happen again”.
Traditionally, the smart way to deal with these sea-change transitions is for the professionals to get in front of the transition and go with the flow. In this case, instead of griping about how inadequate web and electronic-publishing tools are for producing static formats, they should be lending their expertise (while it still has value) to the software developers coding the rendering engines and ereader apps so they can encapsulate the rules of “proper” typographic presentation and deliver aestheticly-pleasing output dynamically, on-the-fly, in accordance to the consumer’s general or specific desires.
Again: reading is not about books (or newspapers).
Its about the experience. The reader matters.
The balance of power has shifted, irrevocably and happily, from the producers and distributors to the consumers.
They need to accept this and adapt or they will surely die.
As the co-inventor of ClearType, former head of the e-book division at Microsoft and a Microsoft fellow, Bill Hill would seem to know enough about typography on computer and e-book displays that he doesn’t need advice from us in the peanut gallery.
Someone who doesn’t balk at display limitations but instead invents a whole new technology to improve them (you see it in Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, etc.) and who gets Microsoft to create software just for reading (eg, MS Reader) — well, I guess I’m just trying to express my surprise that the issues Hill raises have engendered instead a discussion of his bonafides.
As for myself, I think the schism between XSL-FO and CSS has a lot to do with the problems he describes, and that the W3C was never able to keep those two technologies in harmony, much to our detriment today.
Roger
Roger,
Perhaps you are right, and I’ll be the first to step up to the plate to tell you LIT is GORGEOUS. Like, orgasmically gorgeous.
But if you can tell me an ebook reading device in wide use that reads it, I’ll eat my hat.
The point of ebooks is not typography. It’s content. People who buy and read ebooks know that. They only care about the most basic of formatting (chapter heads, ToC, paragraph spacing, and line height, to name a few) to make it easy for them to read. And, oh, that it be adjustable by the customer with regard to font size. Rigid typography takes that flexibility (which is one huge reason people use ebook reading devices) and gives the reader a bad experience.
Please remember: It’s about the READER.
I love LIT.
I bought my BeBook because it promised LIT support.
It half-delivered. (MS Word LITs work, Readerworks LITs don’t. Not without crashing.)
When it doesn’t crash it looks better than any other format on the same hardware.
But it does crash…
Kinda takes the fun away.
Bill Hill may be a software guru, but he clearly doesn’t understand web design. No offense to his expertise on typography and ebooks, but the layout he’s trying to repro in that post is not a very complicated one to achieve, pixel for pixel, on the web, cross-browser too. I would argue with the superiority of Cleartype versus Quartz font rendering. I would also question the “web expertise” at hand here. First of all, the implication of using CSS3 is that you are immediately going to go up against shortchanged implementations in all browsers. CSS2 is the hard reality of web design at this time. Secondly, Javascript is a necessity these days on the web, mainly because it’s the only way to produce consistent rendering across browsers, and he doesn’t even give it a reach-around. Finally, single site browsers and full screen capability are right around the corner. Bill Hill seems to miss the point that “web browser” does not just refer to the button-laden resizable windows with all your other tabs in them. And shame on you, Paul, for elevating his post to this level of importance with your introduction.
Now that there have been more comments to BilHill’s original article, and more replies to the comments from him, I see that he isn’t saying quite what I though he was saying.
He does seem to be dead-set against a scrolling display of text. And he does seem to keep IMO on having the reading software (web or not) take over the whole computer screen. I disagree with both those positions – I think ebooks should work well in scrolling as well as paged mode, and in windows as well as full-screen.
He does make some good points that the amount of control over layout isn’t as good as one would like ideally.
Current eBooks have static layout choices, Decided when the ebook was created. I think what BillHill is arguing for is that eBooks need to incorporate layout hints, so that the ebook display software can adjust the layout for different display size and font size.
So, in his example pages. If the display is landscape, the picture should float to the right of the heading, but if it’s in portrait mode, the picture should appear underneath the heading, and scaled to fill the rest of that page. If displaying in landscape with the picture opposite, and the text doesn’t quite fit at the chosen point size (say two lines over), the hints should tell the display software when sace can be removed and/or by how much the headlines or body copy can be reduced from the user’s chosen base font size. (Or enlarged to make it exactly fit.)
Paul,
I think I understand with your point of view and I agree with portions of it. But I think you may be giving BillHill too much credit here. I don’t think his article mentioned “portrait” at all. My impression was of someone who wants the reader only to use his precise layout, compromising not at all for different platforms.
And sure, there’s certainly merit in that argument, but I feel that’s the point of view of a write who treats every aspect of the book as an essential part of the artistic expression. Other authors clearly feel that the text is the important part, so the medium should only be optimized to get in the way as little as possible.
I generally agree with the latter for the fiction I like to read, but I appreciate that certain types of books work better at the other end of the spectrum.
(and, to be a little snarky: yeah, his web-production skills aren’t exactly top-knotch, and Papyrus is… not the most readable font out there..)