Quote:
Originally Posted by David Soulayrol
Re-flowing a PDF document is a heresy, and because some manufacturers do it is not a reason to spread this. The whole point of PDF is to provide a portable fixed layout for documents. HTML format, or ePub for the ebooks domain, is the way to go when flexible layout is desired.
Ok, actually there are some re-flowing capabilities in the standard, but they were introduced for accessibility issues for impaired people, not to distort the document gratuitously. So it is an exception, and if a PDF document is difficult to read on a 6" device, then it is probably not designed to such devices, that's all. It is the responsibility of the document's author to think about it.
|
Yeah well, no offense but that's all techno babble, and no real argument for me as a user (I'm a software developer and I know how this sorta thing works).
In theory this may be true, in practice we know how this plays out. NO author (as in less than 0.01%) will even know what this is, let alone deal with it properly. So even though it may be true technically, Kobo should have approached this practically and just include a workaround.
Simply taking the text contents from a PDF and displaying it (in whatever order it appears in the PDF) as plain text would work absolutely fine for the vast majority of all PDFs.
If Kobo chooses not to implement this rather easy solution (it's getting the remaining tiny fraction of PDFs working that is the real heresy), other manufacturers will happily do so instead.