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?
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In a nutshell: PDF has had two main issues related to e-books.
1. PDFs are originally and chiefly designed to maintain the formatting of a document for printing. That means it tends to be a large file, especially when images are involved. The first e-book readers and handheld devices were severely limited in storage space and RAM, and PDFs were almost impossible to read on many devices. As Acrobat has developed further, PDFs have become bloated documents that tend to bog down even the best reading devices short of a full PC.
2. PDF is set to a particular size, usually letter or A4, which is rarely matched by an e-book reader's screen size. Some devices, like Windows-based handhelds can reflow and resize the text in a PDF to fit the smaller screen size. But many other devices cannot reflow or resize PDF text. As a result, your PDF page is either a postage stamp too tiny to read when it is "fit" onto the page, or it must be scrolled left-to-right, then down, to read every line.
The second point is most important these days. Generally what you find is that someone with a dedicated e-book reader must prepare their own PDF files from the original document, at the size specific to their device, in order to make it readable. (I now offer my e-books in RTF, for instance, to facilitate this process for those who desire to do so.) But most e-book reading people try to avoid the hassle of prepping and using PDFs for e-book reading.