5 ms·

PDFs are fantastic, and are still wonderful today. OP's problem isn't solved by PDFs, just like it isn't solved by XML or MP3 or ZIP formats. Simply put, PDF i

PDFs are fantastic, and are still wonderful today. OP's problem isn't solved by PDFs, just like it isn't solved by XML or MP3 or ZIP formats. Simply put, PDF is a format designed to allow me to give you a document where you can be sure (with certain well defined exceptions that I can work around anyway) that you see what I intended you to see. That works brilliantly if I want you to see a letter-sized 3-color document, or an A5 booklet, or a funky 3" x 9" flyer, or whatever other size I want. This doesn't work with e-book readers, because my e-book reader isn't A4 or 8" x 6" or whatever other format the book is in. Epub, mobi, LRF etc. give the e-book reader the ability to format the text (if it's pure text, and not, as OP complains, pre-formatted with assumptions the e-book reader can't match) for the screen or for my options wrt. zooming and font size. I say all of this as both an avid PDF user (I write lots of documentation), and an avid e-book user. You use the right tool for the job. If you're complaining about PDFs on your e-book reader, you're doing it wrong.

mikevm 14y ago
>Simply put, PDF is a format designed to allow me to give you a document where you can be sure (with certain well defined exceptions that I can work around anyway) that you see what I intended you to see. Well put. When I buy technical books, I always look for a PDF format. I want a copy of the book that is the same as the printed one and that's exactly the reason why I like PDF. Plus, things like diagrams and graphs are in vector graphics, and not raster as they are in EPUB/MOBI. I've made the mistake of buying a couple of technical EPUB eBooks that contained graphs, and in all cases it was a complete abomination. The publishers seem to want to produce the smallest files they can, so what used to be vector graphics, become highly compressed and low resolution raster images. Trying to zoom in on a graph on your tablet gives you a resized blurry image. I don't like this trend where some technical ebook publishers offer a PDF version of the book in addition to an EPUB, and the PDF ends up being a mere conversion from the EPUB version, having all the cons I mentioned above. This happened to me on InformIT when I bought "The Mythical Man-Month", and they ended up giving me a refund.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I came to say something similar. One of the reasons I liked the iRex Illiad e-reader was that the screen was large enough and had enough resolution that one could display a PDF and read it at its nominal 'size'. What surprises me about this conversation is how sad it makes me. Displaying documents accurately was a solved problem in 1985 at Xerox. They had a lot of folks who were to document display what web designers are to web page display. They would go on and on and on and on and on about the kerning or the way this ligature in this language had to have this sort of thing in order to be 'correct'. They had fights with Imagen whom they considered the "GeoCities" of document display. Don Knuth got so fed up with how poorly computer formatted documents looked that he wrote his own formatter, and part of that included a representation (dvi) which was designed to be a high fidelity source that could render to the 'best possible' form on the device. These guys generally fought over printers because display terminals were 25 lines of 80 characters for the most part (unless you had a Xerox D-machine). The thing that makes me sad is that we haven't been able to capture any benefit from that war. Everything patented then has expired, whether it was the special 'hinting' Xerox used on fonts or the way they maximized the fidelity of the half toning on two color printers. Sigh.
nine_k 14y ago
How about good old HTML + CSS + SVG for a book format? There is a number of good rendering engines for that, I heard. Also, it's much less complex than PDF. But publishing a book in HTML would require some genuine effort, as opposed to just exporting the book typeset for paper as a PDF, often not even trimming the margins which eat precious e-reader screen space.

mikevm 14y ago

>Simply put, PDF is a format designed to allow me to give you a document where you can be sure (with certain well defined exceptions that I can work around anyway) that you see what I intended you to see. Well put. When I buy technical books, I always look for a PDF format. I want a copy of the book that is the same as the printed one and that's exactly the reason why I like PDF. Plus, things like diagrams and graphs are in vector graphics, and not raster as they are in EPUB/MOBI. I've made the mistake of buying a couple of technical EPUB eBooks that contained graphs, and in all cases it was a complete abomination. The publishers seem to want to produce the smallest files they can, so what used to be vector graphics, become highly compressed and low resolution raster images. Trying to zoom in on a graph on your tablet gives you a resized blurry image. I don't like this trend where some technical ebook publishers offer a PDF version of the book in addition to an EPUB, and the PDF ends up being a mere conversion from the EPUB version, having all the cons I mentioned above. This happened to me on InformIT when I bought "The Mythical Man-Month", and they ended up giving me a refund.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I came to say something similar. One of the reasons I liked the iRex Illiad e-reader was that the screen was large enough and had enough resolution that one could display a PDF and read it at its nominal 'size'. What surprises me about this conversation is how sad it makes me. Displaying documents accurately was a solved problem in 1985 at Xerox. They had a lot of folks who were to document display what web designers are to web page display. They would go on and on and on and on and on about the kerning or the way this ligature in this language had to have this sort of thing in order to be 'correct'. They had fights with Imagen whom they considered the "GeoCities" of document display. Don Knuth got so fed up with how poorly computer formatted documents looked that he wrote his own formatter, and part of that included a representation (dvi) which was designed to be a high fidelity source that could render to the 'best possible' form on the device. These guys generally fought over printers because display terminals were 25 lines of 80 characters for the most part (unless you had a Xerox D-machine). The thing that makes me sad is that we haven't been able to capture any benefit from that war. Everything patented then has expired, whether it was the special 'hinting' Xerox used on fonts or the way they maximized the fidelity of the half toning on two color printers. Sigh.

nine_k 14y ago

How about good old HTML + CSS + SVG for a book format? There is a number of good rendering engines for that, I heard. Also, it's much less complex than PDF. But publishing a book in HTML would require some genuine effort, as opposed to just exporting the book typeset for paper as a PDF, often not even trimming the margins which eat precious e-reader screen space.