Adobe released Digital Editions 1.7 today, and although they mostly mention their support for additional languages and installer for IT professionals in their release notes, the most important feature is the support for full justification.
The previous versions of DE didn’t supported justification at all. In DE 1.7, you can display fully justified text with the text-align CSS property: text-align: justify.
This is both a curse and a blessing. While it’s obviously a very good news to see some support for justification, this is far from an optimal solution for this problem. Text alignment should be a setting available on the reading system: whenever the alignment isn’t specified, the user should be able to change the alignment. Therefore, the optimal solution from a content provider perspective should be to avoid using the text-align property when it’s unecessary.
Now that full justification is available in DE 1.7 it means that:
- Older ePub files that didn’t used this property won’t have full justification
- Once DE is mature enough and finally understand that this should be a user setting, every content provider will have to remove this CSS property from their files
One step forward, two steps back…
For our workflow at Feedbooks, it’s not much of a trouble: we can instantly add or remove this property from our template which will affect all of our e-books (all of our new books will have this CSS property, and we’ll modify the rest of the books later this week), but for most content producers, this might be complicated. From a user perspective, it means that people will have to re-download files (Bad !).
Wishlist for DE 1.8:
- Hyphenation
- Justification as a user setting
Of course, we could solve most of these issues if the IDPF produced an official best practice guide, but I haven’t heard a single thing about it in the Working Group for a while :-/
