Session Idea: Typography

Posted by in Sessions | 4 comments

In broad strokes, here are some topics that could be raised in this session.

  • Font: what’s ok and what is NOT
  • Typography and digital workflows
  • Will we ever make an ebook look as typographically beautiful as a pbook?

We’re counting on your participation to make this session a success – but we’ve hedged our bets by asking David Gee, David Ward, Courtney Horner, Patrick Griffin, and Paul Dotey to help guide this conversation. Let them know what you want to discuss in the comments below.

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4 Comments

  1. Katharine / August 16, 2011

    I’d like to see a real comparison of system fonts among all the ereaders and tablets as well as details of the preferences and settings users have to override the original ebook design.

    I’ve come across instances of trying to typeset ebooks with special characters only to find that some ereaders don’t accept them, which then frustrates the human reader. One big issue book designers seem to have with ebooks is loss of control over content.

    Would also be interested to hear whether anyone has had success in using CSS in ePub format to control typography, colour, etc.

  2. Joe Clark / August 17, 2011

    Katharine, there are no “special characters.” If you mean Unicode characters above US-ASCII, that’s a marginally different story. We’d need to see the actual files you were serving on the actual platforms. I suspect your files are misencoded.

  3. Peggy Stockdale / August 18, 2011

    Do you mean different languages? for example cyrillic or greek characters that might not be represented in all fonts? That could pose problems for any ereader features that allow you to change fonts?
    (I haven’t had any experience coding ebooks, but this can be a problem when choosing fonts for typesetting)

  4. Joe Clark / August 21, 2011

    I covered character encoding in my post-Camp post. There’s an offer on the table to train “industry professionals” in HTML semantics and character encoding. The choice is yours.

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  1. Session Schedule | BookCampTO - [...] Typography [...]
  2. BookCamp Toronto 2011: ‘E-books are hard. Let’s go shopping’  ¶  Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto - [...] predicted, character encoding is a complete mystery to these people. The so-called Typography panel seemed inauspicious even before it happened. ...