Quote:
Originally Posted by akiburis
Here's a point I'd like to make, even if it's not entirely relevant to this thread. Why the endlessly reiterated insistence, in these forums, that PDF is an awful, horrible format for ebooks? The LRF format may support font embedding, but the applications for generating LRF output (I say as a bystander, not having given one a good try myself) seem to have severe typographic limitations. So I think PDF support is a necessity in an ebook (or etext) reading device, unless all you want is something like what I take the Kindle to be, a sort of pricey, branded shopping bag for commercial ebooks in this or that currently popular crippled format.
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It's not reflowable, it's impossible to index properly, screen readers can't do anything with it, and it's really really hard to cache multiple pages rapidly unless you have some serious processing oomph at your back. Hence it's not really suitable for electronic book devices.
The horrible, horrible workaround to some of these problems that some outfits have been using is to back the page images with a dirty OCR. It doesn't work. At all.