Justifying the Nook: A case for PDF

I’ve had my Nook for about two months now, and have read about 8 books on it so far. It’s a great lit­tle de­vice that I’ve been un­able to put down in my spare time. My only real gripe is that, like al­most every other e-​reader out there, it has such poor type­set­ting that you have to won­der if it was de­signed by soft­ware en­gi­neers who aren’t big read­ers—it cer­tainly pro­vides the paper look, but it’s still got a long way to go to pro­vide a read­ing ex­pe­ri­ence equal to a dead tree book.

To give an ex­am­ple, there are cur­rently two types of books you can buy on the nook: those that are left-​aligned, and those that are jus­ti­fied.

Left aligned

Here’s the left align­ment. It’s read­able, but it wastes a lot of space on the right edge and isn’t very aes­thetic. Next we have the jus­ti­fied ver­sion:

Bad justify

This kind of very basic jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is pretty poor look­ing—in at­tempt­ing to cre­ate a nice straight mar­gin, it adds a bunch of ugly space be­tween words. This is the same kind of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion web browsers do, and al­most no­body uses it be­cause it looks so bad. I knew about this going in. Sci­ence fic­tion au­thor Robert J. Sawyer wrote a very in­for­ma­tive post about it, and I set about find­ing a way to solve this prob­lem be­fore my nook even ar­rived in the mail.

One great fea­ture about the nook is that it sup­ports view­ing PDFs, with and with­out re-​flow­ing text. With re-​flow­ing turned off, you’re free to man­u­ally type­set the doc­u­ment any way you want, and it will ap­pear ex­actly how you want on the screen. This is what I was look­ing for. With this you can use Mi­crosoft Word to cre­ate a great look­ing PDF. If you’re feel­ing brave and want even bet­ter look­ing text, pro­fes­sional type­set­ting soft­ware like Adobe In­De­sign pro­vides more ad­vanced fea­tures that will give fan­tas­tic re­sults.

Good justify

Here we can see proper hy­phen­ation and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. A good jus­ti­fi­ca­tion al­go­rithm won’t just add more space be­tween words, but will also be will­ing to shrink it just slightly if it will make things look bet­ter. You can see this in the first line of text, where it fits “adip­isc­ing” in to re­move the white­space that plagued the text in the pre­vi­ous image. It also evenly spaces the en­tire para­graph at once in­stead of just a sin­gle line, and fits more text into each line by hy­phen­at­ing words on line breaks.

It’s look­ing pretty good now, and is al­most like a real book. But there’s a lit­tle more that can be done:

Best justify

Can you spot the dif­fer­ence? I admit, with­out a keen eye and a lit­tle knowl­edge of ty­pog­ra­phy, I won’t ex­pect most peo­ple to. Here’s an an­i­ma­tion to help show the dif­fer­ences bet­ter:

Best justify + good justify comparison animation

There are two things hap­pen­ing here, one more sub­tle than the other. The first is op­ti­cal mar­gin ad­just­ment. This im­proves aes­thet­ics by ad­just­ing each line’s mar­gins ever so slightly to re­duce empty space, giv­ing a more flat look to edges. You can see it on the fifth line, where it com­pen­sates for the empty space under the V’s left edge by mov­ing it out a lit­tle bit. It’s even more no­tice­able with punc­tu­a­tion on the right edge, where it pushes the pe­ri­ods and hy­phens out into the mar­gin.

The sec­ond thing hap­pen­ing is lig­a­ture sub­sti­tu­tion. Cer­tain com­bi­na­tions of char­ac­ters have sim­i­lar fine de­tails in the same spots and can look a lit­tle awk­ward to­gether, and lig­a­tures can make them look bet­ter by com­bin­ing them into a sin­gle spe­cial­ized glyph. You can see this in the mid­dle left of the text, where “of­fi­cae” is slightly al­tered—look closely at the “ffi” and you will see the three let­ters merged to­gether with the first F be­com­ing a lit­tle smaller and the dot over the I merg­ing with the sec­ond F to cre­ate a slightly larger over­hang. Look in your fa­vorite dead tree book, and you’ll prob­a­bly find it in “ff” and “fi” com­bi­na­tions—it’s pretty hard to no­tice with­out look­ing for it, but it is used to sub­tly im­prove leg­i­bil­ity.

There is noth­ing about EPUBs that pre­vent e-​read­ers from per­form­ing this kind of type­set­ting au­to­mat­i­cally. With any luck, one day we’ll get this nice look in all the e-​books we can down­load. The fault is solely within the e-​reader’s soft­ware. Until they start to take type­set­ting se­ri­ously, the only way we’ll get this is with PDFs. Un­for­tu­nately, most e-​books aren’t legally avail­able with­out DRM, mak­ing this kind of dra­matic al­ter­ation im­pos­si­ble with most of the stuff you can buy.

It’s easy to say this isn’t very im­por­tant. After all, it doesn’t af­fect func­tion­al­ity, right? You can still read the first pic­ture! When you’re doing a lot of read­ing, it is im­por­tant. Proper text flow re­duces eye move­ment and takes less work for your brain to process, let­ting you read longer and faster. It also hap­pens to get sig­nif­i­cantly more text onto each page, which means fewer de­lays from page turns—in my ex­pe­ri­ence, it re­duces a book’s page count by around 15%.

There are a lot of com­pelling rea­sons to get an e-​reader. They can store thou­sands of books at once and re­mem­ber your place in each one of them. You can look up un­known words in a dic­tio­nary, and book­mark stuff for later ref­er­ence with­out draw­ing all over a page with a high­lighter. You can browse through mas­sive book stores and read bought books in­stantly with­out ever leav­ing your home. It baf­fles me that they don’t bother to im­prove the sin­gle most im­por­tant part of the de­vice—read­ing!

Posted on June 21, 2010 in E-Reader, Feature Article, Nook, PDF, Typography

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