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commented on The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton (Void, #1)

Peter F. Hamilton: The Dreaming Void (Paperback, 2009, Del Rey) No rating

The year is 3589, fifteen hundred years after Commonwealth forces barely staved off human extinction …

I'm unnerved by the typography in this book. Each chapter has two sub-sections (the 'normal' narration and the 'Inigo's dream' parts), and these look visually so different that at first i assumed they had, for some reason, increased the line height in the Inigo's-dream parts.

some counting of lines on pages later, it seems they haven't, though; instead they set these parts in a different font (fair enough for things set in a 'different universe' — i'm not far enough along to know what that means tho), which is thinner than the normal one, so it leads to the page overall looking lighter. It also looks like the same font they use for chapter headings, where (printed larger) it looks a lot better imho than in normal text.

or at least i think this is what's happening; it's hard to be too sure since pages don't have a constant number of lines (which is normal, anyways — though some paragraphs still have their first line immediately before a page break), and also the text block sort of wanders higher/lower between pages, which ig is also fair for cheap printing