Apple kills fonts in iBooks, strikes blow to standards

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2010/06/apple-kills-fonts-in-ibooks-strikes.html

by mikecane • 16 years ago

74 46 16 years ago

pigsgourdsandwikis.com

tptacek2• 16 years ago

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

gte910h6• 16 years ago

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.

tptacek2• 16 years ago

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?

tumult2• 16 years ago

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!

mikecane2• 16 years ago

These stupid eBook readers are transient duct-tape technology that will fade away. Books will be on the web. Concentrate on the beautiful type for that.

WiseWeasel• 16 years ago

I could see this being appealing; offering books as HTML5 'apps' behind a paywall. You could exploit local storage to cache them on various devices.

marbletiles5• 16 years ago

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.

tumult2• 16 years ago

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

CamperBob• 16 years ago

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

That's an extremely applicable point in many respects. I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people -- senior ones at that -- that are on the verge of open revolt over the direction (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/eff-nothing-new-about-i...) in which the company has been taking personal computing lately.

eelco• 16 years ago

A bit of hyphenation does wonders. I put together some code to add it to NSString: http://blog.tupil.com/adding-hyphenation-to-nsstring/

marbletiles5• 16 years ago

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.

visural• 16 years ago

That doesn't change the fact that Apple is ignoring the published standard.

If that's what they want to do, then they should call it a proprietary format and let people choose whether they want to use it, not have their cake and eat it too.

marbletiles5• 16 years ago

Good point. Does the standard insist on the specified fonts, or are clients allowed to overrule them according to user prefs? If the latter, a fix is just an additional "book default" entry in the fonts menu.

(If the former, that's a lousy standard, right there)

silentOpen2• 16 years ago

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.

marbletiles5• 16 years ago

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.

mikecane2• 16 years ago

>>>If Mike got what he wanted

Do you mean me? I'm not the author of the post.

tta• 16 years ago

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.

jcl2• 16 years ago

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."

commieneko4• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

>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.

commieneko4• 16 years ago

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.

macco• 16 years ago

The thing that worries me most, is that Apple wants to control everything. Maybe even with good intent, but there is no such thing as a good dictator - see the apps the banish at the app-store.

gte910h6• 16 years ago

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

Then make their own format, separate it from ePub. ePub is a ebook standard that pre-exists Apple's foray into book publishing. Make their own standard and don't call their reader ePub compliant.

They're making the IE5 of eBook readers....

commieneko4• 16 years ago

It's my understanding that Apple is supporting a _subset_ of the ePub standard, as are most of the readers. I don't know of _any_ reader that supports the whole standard. If you do, please point it out as I would love to play with it.

To my knowledge Apple isn't extending the standard at all. Is Apple _adding_ anything to the standard? Isn't the DRM (grrrrrrrrrr) that Apple's adding covered under the standard?

eru3• 16 years ago

> 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.)

Yes. But remember: PDF is still evil. Go for PS instead.

commieneko4• 16 years ago

From a user's point of view, PDF is a good experience, at least for highly formatted documents. By this I mean documents for which the specific layout, placement, and aspect ratio is an integral part of the authorship. A comic book/comic strip or a diagram meant to be viewed a certain way are examples of this. Lots of the technical books I have are designed such that to change their visual presentation would require changing the actual content. Like it or not, there's tons of pre-existing content designed for a specific presentation, and PDF (or postscript) are a good choice for that.

The biggest problem with PDF is that it usually requires a specific page orientation and aspect ratio, if not a specific page size. This is okay if you have a large enough display and can resize your viewer window to suit, but it's a bit more of a problem on smaller displays, or irregular shaped or resolved displays. For those, a liquid layout and typographic styling, something like HTML or ePub makes much more sense.

kmfrk• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

mattparcher• 16 years ago

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.

jcl2• 16 years ago

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. ;)

eru3• 16 years ago

The magical Helvetica..

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

yogsototh• 16 years ago

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.

xcombinator• 16 years ago

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.

lizcastro• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

>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.

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

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.

Apple kills fonts in iBooks, strikes blow to standards

Related Stories