I've been reading lots of ebooks for a long while now --- mostly plain text using ybook, .html files or .pdfs using various readers on a Fujitsu Stylistic. Just wound up w/ a Sony PRS-505 here at work to investigate making ebooks for it, but really not liking the native format for its limitations re: fonts &c., so looking more towards .pdfs.

First I hope to revisit the .pdf of Mike Brotherton's _StarDragon_ which I made a while back:

http://www.mikebrotherton.com/archives/002481.html
http://www.mikebrotherton.com/novels/stardragon.pdf

and I'll probably also revisit Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_:

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/willadams/portfolio/typography/thebookoftea.pdf

(that won't read on a Sony though, 'cause print is disabled I believe).

William

Hello William

word is Sony is working on a update for the 505 to handle pdf files better, due out soon.

and I'll probably also revisit Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_:

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/willadams/portfolio/typography/thebookoftea.pdf

(that won't read on a Sony though, 'cause print is disabled I believe).

William

I am not sure whether you can read the PDF as it is on Sony reader. However, you can read the file on Sony reader after converting it into LRF format using PDFLRF. You can download the program here.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13135

I just tried PDFLRF with following options:
- portrait mode
- trim header
- trim page number on the bottom

I am attaching a preview screen from PDFLRF showing how the result will look on sony reader

For the book of tea: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/book/991

Ervserver,

Glad to hear .pdf handling will be even better perhaps.

soilwork,

Thanks for the preview --- looks just like the pages in a .pdf viewer (they're images, right?)

Thanks!

William

hadrien, interesting the link you provided --- the custom .pdf which they provide is also made w/ (La)TeX --- though w/ some settings I find reprehensible --- I'd be curious as to your thoughts on the appearance of my version versus theirs.

William

I hate to say this, but a screen shot from a computer screen is NOT going to show how well it'll look on the actually 6" eink Vizplex screen.

I uploaded the Book of Tea on our book upload section a while ago. And in lrf. So there's no need to convert it at all..

I hate to say this, but a screen shot from a computer screen is NOT going to show how well it'll look on the actually 6" eink Vizplex screen.

I agree. It looks better on Sony reader than the preview screen. However, my point was to show that it is quite easy to convert (print-disabled) PDF files into quite readable LRF books using PDFLRF.

Welcome to the Forum

Patricia, I will respectfully disagree on there being no need of a .pdf version as an option if there's already a .lrf of a given book --- unless I'm the only person in the world who cares about true italic type and nice typesetting in an ebook....

William

Patricia, I will respectfully disagree on there being no need of a .pdf version as an option if there's already a .lrf of a given book --- unless I'm the only person in the world who cares about true italic type and nice typesetting in an ebook....

William

But there are other readers which handle these things better. For example, the CyBook which I have has proper support for font families and will display "real" italics.

Does the cyBook have an H&J system which will preclude stacks, widows, orphans and ensure that all lines are nicely set?

If so, do you have authorization to cut a purchase order to get me one at work (it was work which provided me w/ the Sony and the Kindle (but didn't much like the Kindle --- while it has true italics, the linebreaking algorithm which it uses is the typical, brain-dead, one-line at a time thing which has been obsolete since Knuth and Plass's seminal paper).

William

The system won't stop prompting me to give an introduction, so this is it. I hope the *&%^$ prompt now goes away.

Does the cyBook have an H&J system which will preclude stacks, widows, orphans and ensure that all lines are nicely set?
No, the Gen3 does not have kerning, hyphenation, widow support. It uses a version Mobipocket to read eBooks and Mobipocket supports none of that on it's own.

Hello all! Long time reader, first time poster. I'm strongly leaning towards the Sony Reader and am currently selling all of my possessions on Ebay to raise funds. In regards to the screenshot above, the text seems really large. I could read it easily if it were smaller. I understand that the Sony 505 allows you to resize the font. Could someone show me a screenshot of something like the one above in a smaller font?

Okay, here're my requirements for an e-text format:

- full choice of fonts (either selectable by the reader, or the designer)
- professional-level typesetting features / controls
- multi-line h&j algorithm, incl. user-definable hyphenations either document-wide or on a per-word basis
- the ability to check a document compleatly for all instances of widows and orphans and stacks and set the formatting so as to preclude such

AFAICT, the only thing offering all of the above is a .pdf (or Flash or one of the other publishing-oriented formats (e.g., XPS) --- I'd be interested in other tools / formats which address such though.

William