I know you'll hate me, but I love PDF

[RobertDDL]

I am aware that most people who read e-books see the liberation of text from the confinement of the fixed page, its adaptability to various screen sizes and individual display options, as progress, but I regret this loss of form. Well designed pages give a book a shape, an optical flavor, a visual identity. Good typesetting, by taking care of a lot of small details, smoothes out the visual bumps that interfere with reading, just as noise interferes with listening to music. But good typesetting needs pages -- with dynamically formatted text it simply cannot be done. Size matters, of course, and this goes both ways. I understand the allure of small and lightweight devices on which a fixed layout makes little or no sense, but my ideal e-book is in PDF format, with a proper layout, to be read on an 8" or 10" screen. Yes, I know, it's a minority view...

[pdurrant]

Burn the heretic!

No, really that's fine. You can like PDF. You're wrong, but that's OK.

[Jellby]

I like what you can do with PDF too, that's why I uploaded some books in PDF format (see these). But PDF is good for self-consumption, not so good for distribution, unless you create at least a different version for each screen size (and then people will ask for different font sizes, different line spacings, margins, screen orientation...).

A compromise solution is creating PDFs from ePubs, with the Prince PDF calibre plugin. You can distribute an ePub and embed some settings that will allow anyone to create an acceptable PDF version too.

[pdurrant]

I think any auto-generated ePub is likely to suffer the faults the OP identifies in reflowable formats - poor justification, and poor pagination.

I hope that it's a temporary problem. It should be possible, given the speed of current processsors (even those in eReaders) to do a much higher quality layout, if the effeort is put in in the renderer.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think any auto-generated ePub is likely to suffer the faults the OP identifies in reflowable formats - poor justification, and poor pagination.

That depends on the converter. If you use the same HTML renderer as your usual ePub reader does, then I agree, you arrive nowhere.

But you can use something that can give you a better result, as I believe Prince does: it has better justification, hyphenation support, additional features (like floats, footnotes), etc., not to mention CSS3 and OpenType support that the ePub reader probably lacks.

Indeed, most of this could potentially be done on the fly by an utopic ePub reader, but until such a thing is released, we can generate the PDF offline and enjoy it.

[pdurrant]

You're right.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

I know you'll hate me, but I love PDF ...

I am not going to hate you ... unless you are a publisher ;-)

I personally love to complain about shortcomings of text formatting and lack of typesetting on an e-ink screen of the typical reading device. One of possible answers is creating a tailored pdf that is formatted specifically for the screen size. You can use whatever fancy typesetting software that won't create rivers, widows, orphans and much worse atrocities typical for e-ink readers.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of pdf files out there are of poor typographical quality, formatted for A4 or Letter. Not good for my 6" e-ink reader, I am afraid ...

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by kacir

I am not going to hate you ... unless you are a publisher ;-)

Well... I've said you'll hate me...

Originally Posted by kacir

You can use whatever fancy typesetting software that won't create rivers, widows, orphans and much worse atrocities

I still say that the only software that's really able to do this, at least for the time being, is the human brain, and this takes a long time to do it. So, creating different versions for different screen sizes would be quite time-consuming and expensive, and from the publisher's POV, why make the effort, when you can have one-size-fits-all formats which most readers prefer anway.

Originally Posted by kacir

Not good for my 6" e-ink reader, I am afraid ...

Yes, I know... If Amazon would only listen to me and make the Kindle 8"...

[darryl]

No, I don't hate you, not for liking pdf or even for being a publisher. However, if you are with one of the Big 5 then I would like some of my money back for all of the books I bought at rip-off prices years ago.

PDF is fabulous at what it does, which is esentially to describe with precision a page. It is simply not flexible enough to give a good reading experience on most ereaders, which are generally not designed to display whole pages and give the reader choices of font sizes etc. My reading experience with pdf's on all ereaders I have tried is very poor. What's even worse is that a great deal of manual work is needed to get a satisfactory conversion of a pdf to a more appropriate format. So much so that it is usually preferable to read a very imperfect conversion to epub or mobi including the need to skip page headings and numbers constantly than to read the original pdf.

[WillAdams]

Algorithms fail and tend to get stuck in circular loops doing the last few corrections on pages --- a particularly intractable problem for H&J is the detection and elimination of multiple word stacks.

ePubs could and should be better, but until we get true A.I. (or perhaps even Self Aware) machines which are able to determine which form of a word is being used so as to determine the correct hyphenation point), they'll never be perfect and a person will always be able to do better.

Some .pdfs which should be well-done:

- http://www.mikebrotherton.com/novels/stardragon.pdf (I did that a long while ago)
- http://people.umass.edu/klement/russell-imp.html

Hmm, I've just realized that the loss of my Verizon hosting means that my copy of _The Book of Tea_ is now off-line....

[kacir]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

I still say that the only software that's really able to do this, at least for the time being, is the human brain, and this takes a long time to do it.

Even a long time ago a good program (early versions of inDedsign, oe LaTeX) produced *much* better results that current generations of e-ink readers that make absolutely no attempt to balance the whitespace on neighboring lines.
You still need a human hand to produce great results, but all I am asking is less atrocious output.

At the time when I dabbled in Desktop Publishing a typical workstation (high-end 486, 8MB RAM) had slower processor and waaay less memory than a modest e-ink reader. And it was enough to run fancy programs that at very least tried to do basic things like word hyphenation (that Kindle doesn't do in this time and age - but that is a different rant).

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by darryl

However, if you are with one of the Big 5

This, at least, I can justly deny!

Originally Posted by darryl

It is simply not flexible enough to give a good reading experience on most ereaders

Yes, I fully agree. What I should have said more clearly from the beginning, is that I love a well-designed PDF in combination with a large enough screen, or rather, I love a large enough screen in combination with well-designed PDFs. But since I cannot influence actual screen sizes, I know that this is an approach of limited general relevance... and I often read plain text with pleasure...

[DaleDe]

PDF's and of course other formats are accepted in our upload library. It is a great place to share eBooks that are not copyrighted or available under CC license.

Dale

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

What I should have said more clearly from the beginning, is that I love a well-designed PDF in combination with a large enough screen, or rather, I love a large enough screen in combination with well-designed PDFs.

And of course, "large enough" just means whatever page size the PDF was designed for. Well-designed PDFs can have small page sizes too

[markom]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

...

Yes, I fully agree. What I should have said more clearly from the beginning, is that I love a well-designed PDF in combination with a large enough screen, or rather, I love a large enough screen in combination with well-designed PDFs. But since I cannot influence actual screen sizes, I know that this is an approach of limited general relevance... and I often read plain text with pleasure...

I usually choose pdf (with OCR layer behind the exact image) even if there is available good epub/mobi made from the scan because I want 100% accuracy for every sign/letter.

We can read A5 and A4 multi-column pdfs easily even on 6" reader by cropping the margins and using landscape for A5 pdf (takes two or three screens per page) and multi-column mode in portraite for multi-column pdfs (takes four screens per page for two-column pdf).

If our reader's pdf capability is not good enough we can crop margins or adjust pdf beforehand on PC using k2pdfopt, briss etc.

For one-column A4 pdfs we need 10" screen in landscape (or high resolution 8" if we don't mind small letters) or pdf reflow for 6" screen.

It's again good to use k2pdfopt because it can reflow even scanned image, not just ocr layer behind the image like majority of e-ink readers do, because there will be no visible ocr errors in this way i.e. we get 100% accuracy.