Hi James, All, You bring up an interesting point. You, also, prove my point of poor design of the devices and their software. As far as filling the page there are guide lines which work quite well. That is using percentages and multiples of the size of em for the font used. Tables are a problem, in there own right, and depend highly of the output media they where designed for. The other problem is graphics, which as tables do scale well. But, here the problem is display real-estate. Though, any device under 6" should not be considered a true reader. In other words, smart phones are not readers! Though they are fine reading text, if one can handle reading small font sizes. On the other side anything above 10" causes problems, too, because their is too much real-estate. But, then we are forgetting large format books. So, the status quo is that there is not way to preserve the original layout on the e-reader devices of today. Furthermore, any attempt to create a master format geared to the output devices will cause problems down the road. I believe the majority of books can be rendered decently in the 6" to 10" range as the books come in this format anyway. So were doe this leave now, practically all proposed master formats are not aimed at preserving the original layout, but at supporting more or less a particular output format. This all reminds me of the early days of computing where text processing and output was a pain. There was an answer: TeX. Today, I believe the answer lies in Lua(La)TeX or ConTexT. It has the potential to preserve the original format and output that. Furthermore it can be extended to contain any information one wants to add. The best is one can have it output the format one wants, with whatever parameters one cares to have. If something new comes along or changes just pop in a new Lua-module or change an existing one. The only draw back there is no tool chain. regards Keith. P.S. Yes, I need to provide some proof. when I get around to it. Am 18.10.2012 um 15:15 schrieb James Adcock <jimad@msn.com>:
Whatever master format you use it should do two things adequately preserve the original layout, and be able to be converted to the formats acceptable by the devices available today and the future.
Those who have tried it find these are mutually exclusive goals. How to format something as simple as a "Dear John" letter found within a book becomes dependent on the width of the target class of devices. Wide devices need ways to use up that width or they look stupid. Narrow devices need ways to fit it all in or they look stupid. Formatting and display of information within tables is another, and more severe example of the difficulties we run into. And some very simple things simply "look" different on paper and on electronic devices, leading to different design choices, such as choice of font, and choice of paragraph formatting -- indent looks better on paper, whereas line-between (as Mr. Hart chose) looks better on electronic devices. And the format choices we have to work with today do not understand, nor support, the need to deal with these issues "automatically."