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Comment by theoh | Hacker News Reader

Excuse my peevishness, but your attitude is typical of programmers who decide to dabble in "nice formatting". I downloaded the epub book in the expectation that the typography would be a shambles, and it was.

I get that this is a hobby for you. But the arrogance and vanity of software folks who think they can do typographic design (without any training, eye for type, or respect for the real skill and tradition of typography) just leads to bad results.

This goes very much for http://sile-typesetter.org as well, for example.

I probably sound completely intolerant. What I'm trying to say is: your smugness is misplaced.

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Typographical passion is no license to break the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't attack anyone personally on HN again, even if they suck at something and you're perfect.

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I downvoted you not because you disliked the typography, but because you chose to attack the poster and not the content. You can dislike the typography all you like, but I can't fathom how you read OP's message and got smugness or vanity. What part, exactly, was smug or vain?

You wrote: "I get that this is a hobby for you. ..."

But then demanded a non hobby level of commitment to the craft.

"..But the arrogance and vanity of software folks who think they can do typographic design (without any training, eye for type, or respect for the real skill and tradition of typography) "

So how does anyone get _in_ to typography, exactly? Is it by having it as a hobby and moving forward or is it only available to people who complete apprenticeships? Who are you to deny anyone their hobby?

Not intolerant, I appreciate the quest for perfection! What the project aims for is ‘considerably better that other ebooks’. If there’s more we can do I’d really love to hear it. Obviously to a certain extent we’re constrained by the limitations of HTML and CSS (i.e. ePub’s internals) but any ideas would be welcome on the SE mailing list or directly to me (robin@reala.net).

Also, and just to check, you didn’t run the epub you downloaded through Calibre first did you? Because that does its own internal conversions that can wreck the formatting (I’ve been bitten by this in the past).

2nd also: what reader hardware / software were you using? It’d be good to double-check there’s not a bug we’re missing that isn’t present with any of the core team’s setups.

It might be more constructive, and interesting for others, if you explained specifically what OP got wrong in their typography.

You shred someone's effort to produce a PD volume. Yet you don't offer a single constructive criticism or point to any of these glaring and obvious issues from which they may learn. Not even a hint. That to me is smug and arrogant.

I'm no typographer or publisher, but the book appears correctly and neatly formatted, without error. That puts it in a better state than probably 75% of the commercial ebooks I have paid for. From professional publishers.

So personally I think he deserves thanks, not insults.

The real problem is that typography (and other forms of design) contain a lot of "emporer's new clothes" thinking.

Take 10 ebooks and ask people to rate the typography. The book has to be pretty bad before the general public notice.

And, as others have said, often the professionally produced book is pretty bad.

> arrogance

> vanity

> smugness

I'm trying to understand how these personal qualities would apply to the person you responded to. I generally try to avoid coming across as any of these things and so it worries me a bit that I might be completely missing something in my understanding of social skills.

Could you or someone else explain?

"Anyone can contribute to make a Standard Ebook better for everyone!"

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/

Improve it then.

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