Hey, that gnu is not dead ... yet. Don't flog it until it is. :-)

It's been a pleasure giving you something to smile about in the morning. :)

If you care enough and agree with RMS about the "GNU/Linux" naming issue, you shouldn't have been running Flash in the first place.

Gargl, yes, "Computer Modern" is ugly (but they really should be using Latin Modern these days, although that is only slightly less ugly).

But then we are back on topic that people can and will screw up the design. My personal favorite for long non-technical text is actually Palladio (a Palatino clone).

Condensed is harder to read at smaller font sizes and ugly IMO. But the font size was of course also chosen to show that the Kindle doesn't do proper hyphenation and justification and how ugly it can look because of this in a bad case.

This Kindle Touch is only sold in the USA, but there are other models that are also sold over here and they don't do it better. German is of course a notorious case for word length and therefore you more often see the ugly line breaks because of the missing features.

As a programmer, I'm almost insulted that they don't do better. The Kindle Touch is a really cool piece of hardware (even running Linux) but they screw up so hard with the software. I mean, hyphenation isn't rocket-science and even a bad programmer can implement this easily.

As I said in my previous posting, this is just one large line of text without any paragraphs to highlight the problems. The Kindle does a "most-of-the-time-justification". It stretches the whitespace between words somewhat to justify the line but if it would have to stretch the words too much, it doesn't justify the lines. Thus preventing big holes in the text at the cost of justification.

If you're reading English texts and using a condensed font, you might almost never see this but it happens also with English text.

The text I used is composed from the beginning lines from several books by Kafka.

Unfortunately Word has something to with typography:
  1. bad typography
  2. people thinking it produces good typography

The kindle handles text novels just fine? Sorry, no, it doesn't. It only handles the bare minimum for displaying text.

Look at this picture.

Displaying one line of text without any paragraphs. You see no hyphenation, no real justification, no kerning (look at all the space between a 'T' and an 'o'), let alone advanced features like hanging punctuation.

Which, according to most typographers I talked about it to, is not the case with LaTeX. I mean I am sure Lamport knew his stuff, that just his stuff was physics, not typography and design. Besides, defaults for physics journal articles will not necessarily be the same as defaults for a book of literature.

Oh yes, don't use the LaTeX' standard "book" package by Lamport. I completely forgot about that because it's so old. But I don't think it's fair to judge by stuff from the 80s. We don't do that with Word either :).

There are much better packages for a long time, like "memoir" or "komascript". But those mainly change the page layout and the default settings for fonts. For the cool microtypography stuff you also need something more recent than Knuth's original TeX compiler, like luatex (which shall finally get to 1.0 in 2012) or pdftex.

In short, just install TeXLive or MiKTeX and use that.

If programmers designed eBook formats, they'd have vector graphics support.

So true.

I wish they would. LaTeX is typically much better at typesetting than your average artist/editor using Word. All real programmer would use LaTeX right? (No, I haven't RTFA)

Software can't turn you into a great designer any more than it can turn you into a great programmer.

No, it cant. But good software at least has decent defaults that were set by someone that knows his/her stuff.

TFA is actually not as harsh on the programmers as the summary sounds like. Quote from TFA: "We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers whoâ"despite their excellence at programmingâ"are not designers."

Programmers should be programming and the design should be done by designers. Pretty obvious, isn't it? So really the publishers should be blamed for not releasing their books as ePubs or - when the book has requirements that ePub can't fulfill - let designers design the more elaborate eBooks.

Of course programmers usually don't know about typography (unless they have an interest in it [hi fellow LaTeX friends] and I suggest you pick up a good book or blog about it, it's really fascinating).

"Essential features" like podcast support. That is a killer for me.

I'm surprised that there isn't a good OSS music player around that includes podcast management at least as good as Amarok 1.4.10 does (Maybe there is but last time I looked I also needed libgpod support so maybe some great programs did fall through).

genius programmers thought it was great to blindly map color to grayscale

Huh, what do you mean? g = (r + g + b) / 3;

That's probably exactly what they did (or what the display driver does as the browser probably doesn't adjust the colors at all).

But when doing it this way, you often get bad contrast (slightly-darker-gray on slightly-lighter-gray). See this page for an illustration with pictures.

Only the versions with the free 3G limit you to Wikipedia and amazon. If you're on WiFi, the browser will render any webpage.

But the browser (an oldish version of webkit) is hardly usable because of color issue (genius programmers thought it was great to blindly map color to grayscale) and the UI. The browser thinks it can act like running on an ipod touch and it feels sluggish and unresponsive and stuttering because of this.