Jump to content

Fixed fonts on sony readers

illusioni's Photo
Posted Aug 19 2011 08:11 PM
2576 Views

Hello,

I'd like to inform you that all O'Reilly ebooks that have fixed fontsizes (CSS-style with fontsize in px) do not display very well on Sony readers.

Sony products resize text with relative size units but fixed-size text with px stays the same size.

It looks like all O'Reilly books use fixed sizes for source code.
This results in barely readable code examples.

I attached a picture of the book "Building and testing with Gradle" on new PRS650 in two size settings.
+ "Normal" body text resizes nicely (see green marks)
+ The source code doesn't change size (see yellow and red marks)
+ As a result code examples always will break ugly and be hard to read on most readers (see red marks)


I'm glad that you provide DRM-free ebooks! :-)
This way I was able to adjust the CSS-style in my book manually.

Maybe you'd like to re-think the fixed-size style for those customers who don't want to work their way into CSS...


Kind regards,
Klaus

Attached thumbnail(s)

  • Attached Image


Tags:
2 Subscribe


1 Reply

0
  Adam Witwer's Photo
Posted Aug 23 2011 05:27 AM

Hi Klaus,

Thanks for your feedback. It is very helpful. Optimizing the EPUB CSS for best display across the wide array of devices and reading systems is very challenging. The fixed width font does indeed use a fixed font size because the font itself (which is embedded for its rich glyph set) appears larger than the body font in most reading systems. When we had the font set at a relative size, we received complaints that it looked too large on the screen in comparison with the body font. But I also realize the fixed font size causes the issue which you raised in your post.

The good news is that we're reviewing and optimizing our EPUB rendering across devices on an ongoing basis. We'll take another look at the code font size and see if we can find a better solution.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Adam