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I love PDF. Just last night I synced the revised report on Haskell 98 (as a PDF) over to my iPad and stayed up late reading it in iBooks. Having the format ba

by pohl 16y ago

I love PDF. Just last night I synced the revised report on Haskell 98 (as a PDF) over to my iPad and stayed up late reading it in iBooks. Having the format baked into a platform helps, I'm sure (anybody remember the days they called quartz "display PDF"?) so anybody who only knows about Acrobat Reader is forgiven for the bad impression they have of the format.

rufo 16y ago
Indeed. PDF is a great experience on OS X, and a decent one on iOS. (While its main UI is rather cluttered, I feel GoodReader does a better job with PDF than iBooks, solely for the margin cropping and table of contents support.)
- dunham 16y ago
  I found that switching pages in GoodReader was pretty painful, but this seems to have been fixed in the most recent release. (The main UI is a little weird, too, but it gets the job done.) iBooks PDF is decent, especially for a 1.0 product. They do need to add TOC support and 2-up would be nice. But my biggest issue with iBooks is organizational, with only 30 books, my collection is hard to manage. (I'd like to keep separate lists of "to read", reference, "already read", etc.) Ideally, Apple would also add PDF/epub podcast support for magazines. I imagine Saveur (PDF) or a SciFi magazine (epub short stories) automatically feeding into iBooks. epub is good for novels and the like, but I appreciate PDF for stuff where formatting matters. (e.g. Autumn Omakase http://www.tastingmenu.com/autumnomakase/default.htm http://www.tastingmenu.com/autumnomakase/default.htm ) PDF is also helpful for stuff that iBooks epub can't handle well, like technical documents. On OSX, I really like Preview - it's a dream to use. My only complaint is that it's a little sluggish with JBIG/JPeg2k PDFs. (Scans of old books.) I think it's possible to render these pdf files as quickly as djvu files, but Apple hasn't yet made the necessary optimizations (rendering jpeg2k at reduced resolution).

by pohl 16y ago

rufo 16y ago

Indeed. PDF is a great experience on OS X, and a decent one on iOS. (While its main UI is rather cluttered, I feel GoodReader does a better job with PDF than iBooks, solely for the margin cropping and table of contents support.)

dunham 16y ago
I found that switching pages in GoodReader was pretty painful, but this seems to have been fixed in the most recent release. (The main UI is a little weird, too, but it gets the job done.) iBooks PDF is decent, especially for a 1.0 product. They do need to add TOC support and 2-up would be nice. But my biggest issue with iBooks is organizational, with only 30 books, my collection is hard to manage. (I'd like to keep separate lists of "to read", reference, "already read", etc.) Ideally, Apple would also add PDF/epub podcast support for magazines. I imagine Saveur (PDF) or a SciFi magazine (epub short stories) automatically feeding into iBooks. epub is good for novels and the like, but I appreciate PDF for stuff where formatting matters. (e.g. Autumn Omakase http://www.tastingmenu.com/autumnomakase/default.htm http://www.tastingmenu.com/autumnomakase/default.htm ) PDF is also helpful for stuff that iBooks epub can't handle well, like technical documents. On OSX, I really like Preview - it's a dream to use. My only complaint is that it's a little sluggish with JBIG/JPeg2k PDFs. (Scans of old books.) I think it's possible to render these pdf files as quickly as djvu files, but Apple hasn't yet made the necessary optimizations (rendering jpeg2k at reduced resolution).