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Old 12-21-2012, 09:56 AM   #13
buffaloseven
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Posts: 234
Karma: 634112
Join Date: Sep 2012
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Device: Kobo Aura
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crexis View Post
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.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but the point above is equally valid. PDF exists to give a fixed layout across devices, regardless of screen size. Re-formatting the text in a PDF is, 9 times out of 10, a hack that "breaks" the PDF standard. The reality is that, while popular, PDF is a really lousy format to distribute text-heavy documents, especially if there's little specialized formatting/layout.

It would be nice if the KG could relive the text, but the same could be said for my iPhone as well. In no way is Kobo being misleading about PDFs: the KG can display them and displays them exactly as the author intended.

With the rise of ePubs, it's time quality desktop ePub readers (even OS-level) support and for publishers to move away from PDFs: a format that was really never meant for mainly-text documents.
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