Ligatures in the academic world

A text book that I am using is available in both print and electronic
editions. The electronic editions are made available through a website
called CourseSmart.com. The texts are provided to students at
approximately 50% of list price. The book must be viewed through a web
browser. The publisher's are hoping to cut out or reduce the used book
market. They probably get more per book than they do selling through the
traditional market and give the student value of a book that would cost
less than their purchase and trade-in value of the book.

You might ask what this has to do with typography. I'm reading through
the electronic edition for a course I teach. I'm noticing that several
of the words are missing letters. I curse and complain about the poor
copy editing for the electronic edition. After going through the book
more extensively, I find out that there is a pattern to the missing
letters! The ligatures are missing!!! There are other typographical
issues with spacing around n-dashes, etc.

The publishers could of course all be using pdfs with DRM, and some are.
But CourseSmart is providing services to many of the big name academic
publishers. For this to succeed, the publisher will either have to give
up having the print editions look good. At the moment they do not seem
intelligent enough to know that their published content looks like heck.

....Mike

Are there other errors as well? Mac and Windows have different ASCII sets for the extended character set, and accents and smart quotes are the other common mess ups I see.

Don

Mike, are you just commenting on the poor state of typesetting these days (and/or the lack of knowledge on how to prepare PDFs) or are you actually seeking some specific information?

Nope, just a comment on what I'm seeing. It is in a textbook being
offered for sale by a major publisher through Coursesmart.com. It isn't
a matter of encoding. The text is missing---all ligatures, all curly
quotes or double qoutes. I'm used to seeing different characters due to
encoding issues. The characters are just missing---on a Mac with Safari,
Camino, Firefox and on Windows XP with MSIE 6 and 7. However, the
placement of n and m-dashes are better in MSIE. On the mac side, the
dashes literally pass through the characters on the left and right of
the dash.

Its not our typography that is the issue, but the conversion tools being
used. PDF would be fine if they used them. Eventually, they'll either

a) have better tools (unlikely)
b) switch to pdf (I hope)
c) start telling the people who prepare their books for print, not to
use ligatures, etc since it screws up their online offerings (all too
likely).

Who knows, maybe they'll insist on having all their books created in
ASCII using Courier. I look forward to the return of ASCII line-art---not.

Mike

I'm wondering if they are using a unicode PDF system, and a font that is pre-unicode, leaving all those special characters blank. It could be as simple as paying another $35 for an updated font.

Mike,

If I understand this correctly, I take it that .pdf format is not used as it would create large files, so the files depend upon fonts that the user has installed on his computer, like these Forum pages. That could be the problem -- default or other installed fonts may not include the ligatures and other pi, or the coding by the publisher is incorrectly linking to specific glyphs.

Neil

Mike,

but they don't you any real support options.




That wouldn't fly well, in my book, as their product doesn't work properly in a typical real-world situation.

Neil

Not for me either. When students ask, I tell them it is not ready for
prime time, but for some they seem to like the price.

Mike