newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

October 30, 2012

iBooks 3 minds its Hs and Js

Kindle’s inability to hyphenate has alway been a deal breaker for me. The unsightly gaps this creates in the justified text it insists on presenting is unprofessional and inexcusable.

iBooks 3 just came out, so downloaded it out of curiosity. When I saw that it defaulted to rag-right text, I assumed this was Apple’s way of making a lack of hyphenation less apparent and chalked it up as at least some progress. But then I noticed that there is indeed hyphenation — and that it works even with justified text.

As you can see from the iPhone screenshots above, justified text with hyphenation looks fine — as long as it isn’t all caps. Still, this places iBooks miles ahead of the Kindle.

The terrible job iBooks does with all caps is not exactly endearing, but at least there is the consolation of knowing that these situations are rare.