

Apple kills fonts in iBooks, strikes blow to standards - mikecane
http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/apple-kills-fonts-in-ibooks-strikes.html

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commieneko
This is actually a _very_ complicated issue, and while I frown disapprovingly
at this, I don't completely agree that what Apple is doing isn't right. At
least for now.

Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue
and a "what is a book" issue.

The web is a horror show for a _good_ designer, especially one that values
good typography. The things that bad designers do online, even for major, big
dollar sites give me nightmares. I'm not talking about "pretty" or "arty" or
even elegance. I'm talking about basic readability stuff.

Like it or not, for a while most eBooks are going to be churned out en masse
by sullen, angry publishers that don't want to spend a dime on the tech that
they are (correctly) afraid is going to eat their lunch. They are going to
have a big auto-scripted sausage grinder cranking out pasty white tubes of
text tied off at irregular intervals. I suspect that Apple is simply trying to
make sure these tubes are boiled and sanitary, at least from a typographical
point of view. (Sorry for the metaphor, I'm in a mood...)

Books with non-specific formatting, which includes most fiction, the primary
market target for Apple in this endeavor, are going to be readable, if not
elegant. Notice what they are doing with Safari and their new "Reader"
feature? Maybe they are planning to train their users to throw the "kill
switch" on stupid design, and after a while they'll add a similar feature to
iBooks, and turn the fonts and formatting back on. Or maybe not. His Steveness
is fairly inscrutable...

The good news is that if you are a control freak (and what designer isn't,
another reason for the lock down) then you can simply design for PDF. Which,
if you require actual layout control, and not just typographical control, is a
world class standard (one with LOTS of design options.)

Having said all that, a well designed book is a beautiful thing and a joy to
read. Not because you are marveling at the design, but because you probably
don't even notice it.

~~~
sprout
>This is actually a _very_ complicated issue

No, it really isn't. If Apple really wants to force standard formatting on
them, they can do what they did in the browser, and have a "readability"-type
button. They've already solved this problem.

As someone else mentioned, they might as well use the browser to begin with.

~~~
commieneko
You're right, it's a dead simple issue. I don't know what came over me, or all
the other people discussing this with much sound and fury.

(Imagine, trying to avoid the typographical and layout nightmare that is the
world wide web while you are trying to grow a business.)

Look, the Reader "solution" has many problems. Surf around and try it out for
a while. Plus people are already complaining that it is an example of Apple's
iron heel of "user experience" being forced upon the world. Oh! That's what
people are saying about the iBook problem...

Apple doesn't need to and, frankly, is largely unable to curate the web.
There's already lots of users who are used to dealing with poor design. This
is not the case with books, or at least fiction books, which are not heavily
formatted and typographically simple (we call it elegant...) People expect to
just open them up and start reading and not have to figure things out. You
start allowing complicated layout and interactive CSS and I guarantee you
we'll start seeing book with navigation menus and other foolishness.

Apple is simply trying to make it dead simple for frightened publishers and
weenie techheads to make a simple, commercially viable fiction book that users
will tolerate while creators are learning about the finesse and subtlety of
digital book design.

Either way this gets implemented, lacking a lot of educations on both sides of
the digitally rendered page, there are going to be unhappy people.

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tumult
This is such a minor niggle compared to not having real typesetting via TeX or
something. Nothing else is even worth complaining about until these stupid
eBook readers can do real (as in the non-ragged-right and non-shitty-justify)
layout. "But it's CPU expensive!" That shit worked decades ago, it is
definitely doable. Get off your butts! Or I might have to do it!

~~~
bonaldi
It's completely doable, as Eucalyptus shows on the iPhone. There's absolutely
no excuse for not doing proper typesetting, other than they simply don't
notice the lack of it.

I expect that of Sony, but I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't
have people that really care about these details on the team.

~~~
tumult
Eucalyptus does not look particularly great to me. Is it using a custom
algorithm?

~~~
Lazlo_Nibble
According to the About text Eucalyptus relies on a customized version of
libhyphenate, plus a number of other open components (including LinuxLibertine
as the display typeface).

I love the look of Eucalyptus and haven't seen any other reader that comes
close (particularly at the iPhone/iPod screen size and resolution, and
ESPECIALLY given that as far as I can tell they use the .txt versions of the
Gutenberg files). It's not that they've sacrificed the right goats to the gods
of text presentation magic, it's just that they _actually give a damn what the
output looks like._

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lizcastro
Just for the record, the example in that article is not about serif vs sans-
serif. That was just the simplest example possible. The "Ew" means, "it didn't
do what the standard spec says it was supposed to," NOT "I don't like serif
fonts".

Whether or not ePub lets a book designer choose a font is not up to Apple.
ePub is a published standard that Apple pretends to support. The point of the
article is that Apple lets book designers choose fonts for many elements in a
book, but not all. This is completely non-standard and will lead to hacks.

Whether you would like Apple to choose 6 fonts for you to choose from, or book
designers to offer different choices is completely beside the point. Or at the
very least, a very different point.

~~~
alnayyir
>NOT "I don't like serif fonts".

The person who criticized the article for that isn't going to see this
comment. Don't write manifestos defending yourself to the general public,
reply to specific comments on specific points.

Anything else is a waste of time.

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bonaldi
I'm with Apple all the way here. If Mike got what he wanted, I'd have a much
poorer user experience. There's no way I'm ploughing through a book set in
some godawful sans. Apple's way allows me to choose the fonts I want in a
book.

"Serif, ew!!" tells me everything I need to know about not letting designers
like this control my eBooks.

~~~
silentOpen
How do you deal with sans in a web browser? Custom stylesheets? Why not allow
custom stylesheets in your ebook reader? Better yet, why have this separate
ebook reader at all and put the books in the browser (potentially with
extended UI elements and support like PDFs) where they belong.

If I buy a book, I want to get the book how the publisher, editor, author, and
designer intended. It is wrong for Apple to intentionally change the display
of the book from the design that was intended. If you want to override the
styling in your books, fine, but this shouldn't be mandated.

~~~
bonaldi
Why not allow custom stylesheets? Because the vast majority of Apple's
customers can't write them, is why.

As I said below, perhaps the specified fonts should be a default with
alternatives in a menu, but until then, it's vastly preferable that they use
the reader's font and not the book's.

This isn't a printed book, as the woeful justification should prove. Designers
don't get nearly as much control.

(Ultimately, I think they will offer an option to use the specified fonts.
There's so much wrong with iBooks it feels like the most unfinished 1.0
product out of Apple since Aperture)

As for putting them in the browser: a vanilla browser is possibly the worst
way to display seriously large amounts of plain text. By the time you've added
all the custom elements needed for good reading, you're at a full app
_anyway_. It could be a web app, sure, but that's a different discussion.

~~~
silentOpen
You don't need to give the user the full power to write a custom stylesheet,
just a friendly way to change common properties like paragraph font.

I am not suggesting a vanilla browser _at all_. I am suggesting putting all of
the browsing-like functionality (books, newspapers, arbitrary hypertext) in
the same application. I don't care whether it is compiled-in, a plugin, or a
web app but if it's not even in the browser then it's a bad user experience
from my perspective. I want a unified reading experience. I want unified
search shortcuts. I want unified bookmarks and hyperlinks in books that open
web pages in tabs.

Forcing users to switch apps for a data format that accomplishes most of the
same things that the Web accomplishes diminishes the value of the format to
the user. Application balkanization is not the answer and the fighting between
vendor and publisher over page styling has already played out in the browser.

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kmfrk
I don't know what the fallacy terminology is, but the arguments sounds like
"this decision is bad; thus this other decision is good". I get the criticism,
but the attractiveness of the alternative presupposes some very ideal
conditions which render the alternative inferior.

While the maximum quality might have been better with the alternative, the
minimum and average/median quality will be consistently better with Apple's
choice. I shudder to think that I might pay for a book only to find out that
it is typeset in justified Comic Sans (or Marker Felt ...) with no tracking,
and whichever atrocities the publisher might maul the text proper with.

~~~
maw
It sounds like <http://www.logicalfallacies.info/presumption/false-dilemma/>
to me. And I agree that that's what the argument sounds like.

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jokermatt999
If Apple truly insists that they know better than the publishers, why not have
an option for "Apple's font choice" vs "Standards" in the app? If they still
want to impose their font choice on users, they could even have it enabled by
default. This is ridiculous that they can just ignore standards, and people
will write it off because it's Apple. Design matters, but so do standards.
Don't impose design over standards. If you must put design first, don't
completely ignore standards like Apple did.

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xcombinator
I like to change the defaults. When you use to read green on black instead of
black over white, or change the font size you realize that the designer only
though in one size, and one colour.

PDFs are perfect at only one layout, and font size. At different ones it is
just horrible. It doesn't work right on an iphone-android small screen.

When designers choose fonts, it only works at one size, at different ones,
areas seems different with the same font.

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yogsototh
I am with Apple.

On the web I use readability (<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability>)
a lot. I am happy to be able to read with fonts readable for me. If I could
I'll always surf using readability.

For books I believe overriding designer choice by _yours_ is the best solution
for a good read.

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tptacek
What's the font story on the Kindle? Is this guy asking for a pony?

~~~
gte910h
ePub is a standard. They're breaking it, making ePub books not show as they
should.

Mobipocket (what kindle has) is a different standard. Amazon is mobipocket
compliant.

~~~
tptacek
Thanks, I understand that Kindle is a different standard. I have a Kindle
reader app on my iPad, but not an actual Kindle app, so I'm wondering: does
the Kindle allow authors to control fonts?

~~~
Niten
Every book I've purchased on the Kindle shows up in exactly the same font, and
likewise for any documents that I email to my Kindle. If the Kindle hardware
supports multiple font faces (aside from italic or bold face variants), I
haven't seen any evidence of it.

Fortunately for me, I like the Kindle's font, so I don't consider it an issue
for the type of reading for which I use the device.

~~~
gte910h
It supports multiple font families (which paradoxically, is what the "Face"
attribute in HTML's font tag actually points at).

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tta
For once I agree with Apple's big-brother…ing. iBooks lets you choose a font
for the content you're reading, and it'd be an absolute nightmare having
content that isn't consistent.

~~~
jcl
If I'm reading the article correctly, though, iBooks is making content _less_
consistent. If the author puts custom fonts on all their tags, iBooks is going
to honor all of them except <p>, <div>, and <span>. So you'll be reading along
in Apple's serif typeface, then suddenly there will be a word an <em> tag
rendered in sans-serif italics. As the article author said: "Ew."

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mattparcher
_It will break iBooks as people design beautiful standards-compliant ebooks
that look great in other readers that support standards._

And yet, the author shows an example of _proper behavior_ using _Arial_ for
the book’s body text, and _Trebuchet_ in a garish red to mark up the
screenshot. There are many beautiful fonts, but these are not two of them.

Edit: see <http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html> as to why Arial is
so inferior to it’s predecessor, Helvetica.

~~~
jcl
You might want to reread the article you linked to. That _is_ Helvetica in the
screenshot -- note in particular the horizontal end on the "e" and the
vertical end on the "r". The beauty and superiority are more apparent if you
click on the image and go to the bigger version on Flickr. ;)

~~~
eru
The magical Helvetica..

Still probably not a good choice for the body of a text.

