As many of you know we are working on a weekly newsletter for you to read on your favorite e-book reader. It's pretty much
work in progress and I invite you to take a first look and share your opinion. You can download it from here:
Notice that I've uploaded various PDF versions for the Sony Reader. The first was created with htmldoc, the second with Adobe Distiller, and the third with Ghostscript. None of the three offers an optimal solution (yet):
htmldoc produces what I call "inefficient" PDF files, which can severely slow down page turns on slow devices (such as the Sony Reader). You can try this for yourself when you flip pages, especially as you're approaching the end of the document.
Adobe Distiller produces the by far best PDF files, highly optimized for speed. It may have to do with the "optimized for fast Web viewing" switch (only?) available in Distiller, which cleans up the internal structure of a PDF file to allow for faster page-by-page viewing. Alas, Adobe Distiller is not suitable as we need an automated console solution based on Linux.
Ghostscript produces "better" PDF files than htmldoc, but for some unknown reason, internal hyperlinks would not work with the PDF viewer of the Sony Reader. You can try this phenomenon also by opening the PDF file in the Sony Connect desktop software and clicking on one of the internal links in the document's table of contents.
The Adobe Distiller and Ghostscript PDF files were produced via Postscript through html2ps.
At this point, I am pretty much fed up with PDF. For the same reason, I decided that we will also offer the newsletter in HTML format that you can use with your own conversion tools to convert the newsletter into any other format. For instance, I found it to work pretty well with iSiloX.
Lastly, iRex iLiad users will be able to receive the final weekly newsletter through iRex iDS.
Happy reading!