Ligatures in the academic world

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8 total messages Started by Michael Kazlow Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:05

#496

Author: Michael Kazlow
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:05

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A text book that I am using is available in both print and electronic 
editions. The electronic editions are made available through a website 
called CourseSmart.com. The texts are provided to students at 
approximately 50% of list price. The book must be viewed through a web 
browser. The publisher's are hoping to cut out or reduce the used book 
market. They probably get more per book than they do selling through the 
traditional market and give the student value of a book that would cost 
less than their purchase and trade-in value of the book.

You might ask what this has to do with typography. I'm reading through 
the electronic edition for a course I teach. I'm noticing that several 
of the words are missing letters. I curse and complain about the poor 
copy editing for the electronic edition. After going through the book 
more extensively, I find out that there is a pattern to the missing 
letters! The ligatures are missing!!! There are other typographical 
issues with spacing around n-dashes, etc.

The publishers could of course all be using pdfs with DRM, and some are. 
But CourseSmart is providing services to many of the big name academic 
publishers. For this to succeed, the publisher will either have to give 
up having the print editions look good. At the moment they do not seem 
intelligent enough to know that their published content looks like heck.

...Mike

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#299

Author: Don_McCahill
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:43

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Are there other errors as well? Mac and Windows have different ASCII sets for the extended character set, and accents and smart quotes are the other common mess ups I see.

Don

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#300

Author: Dominic_Hurley
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:29

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Mike, are you just commenting on the poor state of typesetting these days (and/or the lack of knowledge on how to prepare PDFs) or are you actually seeking some specific information?

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#301

Author: Michael Kazlow
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:39

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Nope, just a comment on what I'm seeing. It is in a textbook being 
offered for sale by a major publisher through Coursesmart.com. It isn't 
a matter of encoding. The text is missing---all ligatures, all curly 
quotes or double qoutes. I'm used to seeing different characters due to 
encoding issues. The characters are just missing---on a Mac with Safari, 
Camino, Firefox and on Windows XP with MSIE 6 and 7. However, the 
placement of n and m-dashes are better in MSIE. On the mac side, the 
dashes literally pass through the characters on the left and right of 
the dash.

Its not our typography that is the issue, but the conversion tools being 
used. PDF would be fine if they used them. Eventually, they'll either

a) have better tools (unlikely)
b) switch to pdf (I hope)
c) start telling the people who prepare their books for print, not to 
use ligatures, etc since it screws up their online offerings (all too 
likely).

Who knows, maybe they'll insist on having all their books created in 
ASCII using Courier. I look forward to the return of ASCII line-art---not.

Mike

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#302

Author: Don_McCahill
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:35

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I'm wondering if they are using a unicode PDF system, and a font that is pre-unicode, leaving all those special characters blank. It could be as simple as paying another $35 for an updated font.

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#305

Author: Neil_Keller
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:01

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Mike,

If I understand this correctly, I take it that .pdf format is not used as it would create large files, so the files depend upon fonts that the user has installed on his computer, like these Forum pages. That could be the problem -- default or other installed fonts may not include the ligatures and other pi, or the coding by the publisher is incorrectly linking to specific glyphs.

Neil

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#307

Author: Neil_Keller
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:24

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Mike, 

      but they don't you any real support options.




That wouldn't fly well, in my book, as their product doesn't work properly in a typical real-world situation.

Neil

Re: Ligatures in the academic world

#308

Author: Michael Kazlow
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:59

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1118 bytes

Not for me either. When students ask, I tell them it is not ready for 
prime time, but for some they seem to like the price.

Mike

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