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> How is reading them wasting time? - No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand

> How is reading them wasting time? - No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. - Can't copy images in most PDF readers. - Text selection so bad that it has a 50% chance of selecting some random unrelated characters on the page. - Not to mention needless page breaks which further complicate selection and highlighting. - Hyperlinks often don't work. When reading citations I don't even bother to click links anymore. - Hyperlinks within documents make it difficult to go back. Some readers have a history function, but it is inconsistent. > [...] then PDF will never die. - Documentation is usually written in nice HTML pages and optionally browsable through Apps like Dash. - EPub is standard for books - Academia is the last bastion, but scientific journals already publish HTML versions of papers.

kaba0 4y ago
> No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. Sure, it is not a great UX, but it is not like text reflow would produce meaningful results unless explicitly planned for, so the alternative is just shitty text reflow. I much rather rotate my phone. > Can't copy images in most PDF readers, text selection, hyperlinks These are all inherent to PDF generators, nothing to do with the format itself. For every shitty PDF, there is a well-formatted book with proper hyperlinks, beautiful typography, etc. Also, text selection usually doesn’t work when it is either an OCR or deliberately obfuscated which can just as well be done in web tech (by rendering to a canvas for example). Other than text-only books, epub is nigh useless if you have even a single figure in the text. And then there is the question of changing page numbers (depending on font rendering), and the text rendering is still nowhere near as good as what LaTeX generates.

kaba0 4y ago

> No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow. Sure, it is not a great UX, but it is not like text reflow would produce meaningful results unless explicitly planned for, so the alternative is just shitty text reflow. I much rather rotate my phone. > Can't copy images in most PDF readers, text selection, hyperlinks These are all inherent to PDF generators, nothing to do with the format itself. For every shitty PDF, there is a well-formatted book with proper hyperlinks, beautiful typography, etc. Also, text selection usually doesn’t work when it is either an OCR or deliberately obfuscated which can just as well be done in web tech (by rendering to a canvas for example). Other than text-only books, epub is nigh useless if you have even a single figure in the text. And then there is the question of changing page numbers (depending on font rendering), and the text rendering is still nowhere near as good as what LaTeX generates.