Having played with it for a while, I’ve come to some realizations about the way text is displayed on the Kindle.As we all know, hitting Alt-G to refresh the screen you’re on gives you a slightly thicker, more well defined text as opposed to hitting Next Page. I think the reason for that is because the designers made a compromise as to refresh times during regular reading. The slightly thinner fonts during a regular "page turn" contribute to the fact that Kindle 2 can refresh way faster than Kindle 1 and I think faster than the Sony.They had to make some calculated compromises of fonts displayed vs. refresh times and I think they made the right decision. If I’m not examining fonts, if I’m just into a book and I’m reading, the fonts look fine and the page turn takes less time then for me to move my eyes to the top.Now, having played around with the darker font hacks, there seems to be a very faint ghosting during regular page turns — very faint. But the ghosting is done away with if I hit Alt-G. But there is no ghosting with the native font. Why? Because the native font’s contrast was optimized for the fast refresh of the regular page turns, the hack wasn’t. As I said, the ghosting is very faint and does not take away from the reading experience if one wants to use them. However my playing around with them make me more understanding of the decisions of the Kindle design team, and the fonts / contrast considerations that many people seem to have an issue with.

Reply to this post.

Be Sociable, Share!

•