Issue 02 of Quarter Up, and Updates To Paragraphs On Mobile
The next issue of Quarter Up was published this week. You may read it by clicking here. Quarter Up is an online newsletter about pinball and retro arcade games, published on Nantucket E-Books™.
This latest issue has coverage of Houston Arcade Expo 2022, a review of a panel with Brian Colin, a guide to arcade sticks, and a piece from Buffalo, whose book Tales of a Metal Fisherman may be ordered by clicking here.
While promoting this issue, I got some feedback that the justified text did not look good on mobile. I agree. Justified text is part of bringing culture into the e-book experience, but it falls apart as the paragraph width narrows. This is not just a problem on smartphones, it’s been a problem with justified text even back to the 1880’s when newspapers were typeset on Linotype machines.
Thanks to the stylesheet overhaul I introduced in Version 2 of the platform, it was easy to make a quick fix to the newsletter by changing body paragraphs from justified to left-align. Already people think the mobile reading experience is improved.
I see two long-term solutions. The first would be to add another media query that uses left-align for smaller screens, and justified text for tablets and desktops/laptops.
The second solution is to start building a table of words to take advantage of word-break elements, which lets browsers break up and hyphenate words if they are going to exceed the width of the paragraph. Looping through the table, if a word match is found, it could replace the word with its appropriately-hyphenated counterpart.
Another suggestion was to make the default text smaller, reducing the amount of scrolling required. I will consider this as well.
Send me your comments (see below), I look forward to further feedback.
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