Re: ebook format

[Oliver Corff]

Actually, I was thinking along the same lines. I also have a perl script
which reads the text sources I am working on currently, processes their
very special (and terse) markup and produces a groff file which is
processed with groff -ms and a few parameters defining "paper size" etc.
The groff file imports (.so) a header with all necessary font size,
margin and hyphenation settings --- I found out that line-breaking seems
to expect at least letter or A4 pages to deliver pleasing results, and
it may well be necessary to say .kern 0 in order to turn off kerning.
Some ebook readers (I speak of physical devices, not viewers for
ordinary computers) struggle pathetically with the display of
well-kerned text (seems to be an issue whether the built-in font matches
the metrics of the font information delivered by the PDF). I was
astonished to see the first result on my PocketBook Inkpad (which, in
all other aspects, is a very nice device); I was so puzzled by the
results that I did not immediately think of kerning, but disabling
kerning really saved the day. The right margins are not completely even,
so a little ragged contour is visible, but ... so what.

Best regards,

Oliver.


On 10/06/2021 23:01, Deri wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 June 2021 21:12:01 BST Wim Stockman wrote:
> > What is the best and easiest way to convert a groff document to
> > kindle friendly format?
> > or other opensource ereader format , not pdf format?
> >
> > kind regards
> > Wim Stockman
> Just out of interest, why do you dismiss pdf format for reading on the kindle? 
> I find you have
> greater control over the way you want it to look using groff and pdf. I 
> download the text version
> from the gutenberg website then run a program which uses groff to make a pdf 
> which is exactly
> how I like to read. I use a first gen kindle, don't know how it would look on 
> later versions. The
> pdf attached has been shortened to one chapter and it is formatted for my 
> preference if you are
> viewing on kindle, not desktop.
>
> Cheers
>
> Deri