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PDF is one of the best things IMO - it's like a docker container for documents. The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the thin
by systemvoltage 6y ago
PDF is one of the best things IMO - it's like a docker container for documents. The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.
For example, I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi. I want to rely on professional typesetting from the publishers, not some front-end engineer's vision of what the ebook should look like and how it should be presented to the user. It works only for novels and long form reading where typesetting is not critical. Basically any book that also has a good audiobook version works fine with epub/mobi since visual formatting is a non-issue. For everything else - programming books to research papers, PDF is great. Can PDF format be improved? Sure, but the level of adoption and its widespread use is more important than fixing copy paste and content migration aspects of PDFs.
What I absolutely DO NOT WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. That IMO defeats the purpose of what the container is supposed to do, i.e. contain and not leak. It should most definitely have fixed physical dimensions (or pixels).
- ketamine__ 6y agoWhat device do you use to read PDF's?
- crazygringo 6y agoI personally use an iPad. It's amazing for it. Especially when you use the Apple Pencil to highlight text, make annotations like circles or question marks, etc.
- lilactown 6y agoI struggled to find good software for this. Is there a specific app you recommend?
- schaefer 6y agoOn the iPad, I use goodnotes for that. You can import PDFs and then mark them up.
- crazygringo 6y agoI've gone back and forth between Apple Books and Acrobat Reader a lot. Ultimately I currently use Books because I do a lot of multicolored highlighting which is far more consistent in Books, and because Books lets you set bookmarks (to go back and forth between main text and endnotes) which Acrobat inexplicably still does not support. Ultimately every PDF app is good at some things and terrible at others, and you're just going to have to find the app that has the best set of features for you. It is pretty sad that all the apps have significant drawbacks for certain common workflows.
- saagarjha 6y agoPDF Viewer has worked well for me, personally.
- ghufran_syed 6y agoI use notability on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. You can import the pdf, then annotate
- sjy 6y agoI like GoodReader for this. It’s the only app I’ve found that stores my annotations in the PDF files themselves, and allows me to keep my PDF library in sync over SFTP, Dropbox, etc. so that I can read and annotate documents on non-Apple devices as well.
- e_proxus 6y agoI’ve been a very happy user of LiquidText [1]. You can load multiple PDFs/images/documents into a LiquidText project and annotate and cross reference. There’s a separate work space outside of the documents where you can store clippings and collect summaries. It’s great for reading long standard documents and cross reference between them and supporting material like examples etc. [1]: https://www.liquidtext.net/ https://www.liquidtext.net/
- gpm 6y agoI've really been enjoying a remarkable tablet since I got it a few weeks ago. Great for taking notes, great for reading pdf's (and scribbling on them - which is surprisingly useful!), terrible for literally anything else.
- krn 6y ago> terrible for literally anything else I hope it will soon be the best e-reader on the market, thanks to KOReader[1]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jsb3r7/koreader_on_the_rm2/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jsb3r7/ko...
- gpm 6y agoHopefully, but I don't like counting features before they exist. A feature that does exist - and I maybe should have mentioned, is that one of my house mates finds it really useful for remote teaching, they screen share the remarkables screen to their students and use it as something like a blackboard.
- rsfinn 6y agoThat does sound like a remarkable tablet. What's it called? (...oh, now I get it: <https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/>)
- pklausler 6y agoI love reMarkable 2 for note-taking, but the fact that internal links in PDFs cannot be traversed makes it a non-starter for me as a technical document reader.
- ketamine__ 6y agoIs it a good ebook reader if you're not a prolific note taker?
- gpm 6y agoIt renders PDFs, let's you scale/move where on the screen the page is rendered, let's you flip through pages, let's you switch to a view of page thumbnails, let's you go to a page number, remembers the last page you were on. If you expect more from your ebook reader than that, it is not just because of software. As a sibling comment mentions that might be fixed soon. V1 had long since had support for third party apps. V2 is taking a bit of time (because controlling eink screens in weird) but will probably have third party apps support soon. At that point you will be able to use one of the well known open source ebook reading apps. Edit: And to be clear, all the third party app support is unofficial, the help menu on the tablet includes the ssh password for root, everything past that is just reverse engineering (it's a pretty typical linux system apart from the display).
- cjsawyer 6y agoI use an ipad pro for reading pdf textbooks. The high refresh rate screen makes it more pleasant to use than the android tablets I’ve tried. Also the iOS books app is great, if a little bloated by the store half
- mhh__ 6y agoA computer. I started off my "learning more than what you get taught in school" reading PDFs on a tiny phone, I now do it on a bigger phone, a big DPI monitor etc. none of these platforms makes a blind bit of difference to me because my eyes aren't the bottleneck.
- systemvoltage 6y agoiPad Pro, 10”.
- inetknght 6y ago> I want to rely on professional typesetting from the publishers, not some front-end engineer's vision of what the ebook should look like and how it should be presented to the user. I, on the other hand, do not whatsoever trust publishers. PDF runs software and that means that everything under the sun including malware and DRM can run on PDF -- and indeed that has occurred many times. It should be a non-starter for anyone who actually values the ability to read their content on any device they want.
- systemvoltage 6y agoThere are many other formats, a myriad of text formats from asciidocs to markdown. For embedded devices and such, they work great I presume. Please don't mess with PDFs. 20+ year old technology that is shitty but works, I prefer keeping the status-quo.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoIf PDF had an "accident", and someone was able to do to it what Steve Jobs did to Flash, I would be very happy.
- systemvoltage 6y agoAre there any other "fixed" or "docker-like" formats for documents besides PDFs that solves a lot of problems with PDF format? From what I understand, PDF is an xml based document standard.
- jcelerier 6y ago> The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document. cries in random PDFs that end up being printed with letters spaced by 1 cm
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hcurtiss 6y agoI agree completely. Have you found any good resources for acquiring books in pdf?
- arthurcolle 6y agoLibGen, SciHub
- markandrewj 6y agoGenerally the PDF copy of a book is designed to fit the format of the final printed book. The PDF is even often the deliverable sent to press. If you are using something like an e-reader, or a smartphone, the PDF layout often doesn't translate well. Typesetting is also normally also done for ePub/Mobi, but the layout is tailored to the format of the device that the document will be read on. Although there are times when publishers just take the PDF and click 'convert to ePub', which isn't ideal. There are also other advantages to different formats, when talking about things like programming books. As an example, working code snippets for web formats. I am thinking of things like Jupyter notebook when I say this. As others have mentioned there are also a number of security risks associated with PDF. I can't deny there are several books I have read in PDF format however.
- kall 6y agoI do believe this happens, but I have yet to read a book that looks even reasonably typeset on Apple Books on a phone with anything larger than default. I know a PDF can‘t do that either, but that‘s the promise of these formats right? Between the most typography focused tech company and whatever the publisher puts into the file, they don‘t deliver.
- omnimus 6y agoThere are two issues here: 1. PDFs are fully baked/static and made for one page format (the one original book was printed on). These will never work. 2. Ebook formats are basically webpages and they have CSS. There are defaults from the ebook reader app and but often there are css settings from the publisher of the book. Their css styles mash together leading quite often to bad results. They could be very responsive but i suspect publishers test only on Kindle/ebook readers. I am not sure why they just don't make one "master" style thats tested everywhere. But it's probably because they are not software companies. For them epub/mobi just might mean "black and white ebook release". Also mobi is probably most of the sales and it is pretty restricted design wise compared to epub. So basically blame the publishers.
- leephillips 6y agoWhat do you mean “PDF can‘t do that either”?
- ernst_klim 6y ago> I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi PDF is abysmal for books though. 1) You can't scale fonts to fit various screen sizes. 2) It's waaay more expensive to interpret and render, so it affects battery life.
- cjsawyer 6y agoAnd yet, I prefer it. Textbooks in any other format are miserable to read.
- Ar-Curunir 6y agoTextbooks are different from other kinds of books in that you have formulae and figures that can't easily be reflowed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- systemvoltage 6y ago1) That's a feature, not a bug :) 2) Agreed, but that's a challenge for the engineers, not something we should blame the user for. Users have unequivocally spoken (Look up reviews for epub programming books on Amazon, usually they just want a PDF).
- cratermoon 6y agoNot being able to scale the fonts for different resolutions is something only a young person with 20/20 vision would thinks is a feature.
- systemvoltage 6y agoYou can zoom the whole thing. Scaling fonts while keeping the width of the line the same causes other problems.
- adrianmonk 6y ago> absolutely DO NOT WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text I would love it, though, if PDF included this as something that's always entirely optional. Sometimes I want to read something just as formatted. If my display is big enough, and the formatting has any importance, I probably want that. Other times, my screen is smaller (phone) or the wrong shape (small laptop), and I'd rather the text confirm to the device rather than vice versa. Also, sometimes I use my arrow keys to scroll as I read to keep my place (like a line-oriented instead of page-oriented bookmark). So just because the device is capable of it, I don't necessarily always want page-oriented original formatting because it might have two-column text to deal with or top/bottom margins that serve no purpose for me.
- Closi 6y ago> I would love it, though, if PDF included this as something that's always entirely optional. To be fair that’s what they are working on, with Liquid Mode for PDFs in Adobe Reader. The plan is that it will automatically work for all PDFs using some sort of AI magic.
- mongol 6y agoYes but as I understand, that will be a feature of that reader application alone. And it does not exist on Linux
- wtallis 6y ago> PDF is one of the best things IMO - it's like a docker container for documents. The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document. Sounds like you want the PDF/A standard for archiving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A It forbids embedding audio and video and JavaScript, requires embedding all the fonts, forbids encryption and patent-encumbered compression. It's basically the PDF format with the most regrettable features stripped out.
- Terretta 6y agoThat PDF/A URL surprised me. Curiously, Wikipedia doesn't think it's a page or a subpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:...
- opheliate 6y agoI think the reason it's not appearing there is because you're looking in the "Wikipedia:" namespace, which is actually used for meta pages, not articles (e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ). Searching under the Article namespace (which contains the actual contents of the encyclopedia), it is included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/PDF
- MrSomeone 6y agoWikipedia has subpages disabled in the main article namespace, which makes slashes in article names possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TITLESLASH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TITLESLASH
- sim_card_map 6y agoWe now have JavaScript in PDFs?..
- cratermoon 6y ago
- pklausler 6y agoWould you be happy with some kind of paginated image file format, if it were not significantly larger than PDF?
- odyssey7 6y agoKnuth as a book author has written about this on his website. “Warning: Unfortunately, however, non-PDF versions have also appeared, against my recommendations, and those versions are frankly quite awful. A great deal of expertise and care is necessary to do the job right. If you have been misled into purchasing one of these inferior versions (for example, a Kindle edition), the publishers have told me that they will replace your copy with the PDF edition that I have personally approved. Do not purchase eTAOCP in Kindle format if you expect the mathematics to make sense. (The ePUB format may be just as bad; I really don't want to know, and I am really sorry that it was released.) Please do not tell me about errors that you find in a non-PDF eBook; such mistakes should be reported directly to the publisher.” https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html
- omnimus 6y agoBut thats such a specific example. Math books have so much complex notation and wierd inline elements... he had to invent TeX for that. HTML/CSS wouldn't handle it. Basically for all normal texbooks you will want epub as digital format. And if you have lot of ilustrations or wierd format book then just get the printed version.
- abrowne 6y agoI like PDFs for digital cookbooks as well.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fomine3 6y agoOppositely what I absolutely WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. I wish both option is available.
- systemvoltage 6y agoMarkdown/Asciidocs/reStructured Text :)
- fomine3 6y agoYes, honestly HTML or its subset is enough for me but some author/publisher publishes only ePub or PDF.
- cratermoon 6y agoWhat size and resolution is your eReader? I can read PDFs on my computers fine, the screen is large enough. On my eReader I can't both see a whole page and have the text large enough to read, even with my reading glasses. I end up zooming in to bring the text up to readable size and then I'm only seeing part of the page and have to scroll left/right/up/down to read a page.
- smartbit 6y agoScrolling left/right zoomed text can be prevented with Goodreader and these 2 simple steps - with the crop function in Goodreader remove as much as possible margin left & right. This might cut text in the header/footer eg the page number. Optionally crop odd & even pages differently. - turn the iPad landscape and with 2 fingers pinch to zoom the text until the margins snap to the sides of the screen. Now with a single finger scroll down to read the text from top to bottom. Flip to the next page by swiping with a single finger to the left and Goodreader will conveiniently start at the top of the next page. In my experience for most portrait pages this enlarges the text big enough. As a bonus you can use the iPad Smart Cover as a stand in either position. I use this trick since the original iPad1 as Goodreader has been there since day 1.
- higerordermap 6y ago> The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document. So that it's very very hard to read on mobile, or in a small width window. > For example, I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi exactly the opposite. I want to be able to properly reflow it in a narrow window side by side with another tab on laptop, often for technological books.