PDF is not an eBook format

[TallMomof2]

I could deal with unencrypted PDFs but there are so many technical books that are only available in DRMed PDF. Since there are no eInk readers that support PDFs with DRM and reading them on a TX is ridiculous so I have to buy the dead tree version. One of the big reasons I want to move completely to ebooks is to get rid of my dead tree technical library but as it stands with encrypted PDFs and the inability to read them on anything but a PC, it's not going to happen.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Because:
1. Reflowable PDFs are something that's very new and not all PDF creation software supports that feature. When they do, they create a PDF that is even more bloated than the non-reflow PDF.
2. Since reflowable PDFs are new, most readers don't support them. I believe that only Acrobat supports the format - and then only for Microsoft products. So even if reflowable PDFs were created, they couldn't be used.

Reflowable has been around for years from Adobe. It does eat resources to display properly. I have not seen that the size of the file increases significantly. The bloat, if you want to call it that, is that the reader itself becomes much more complicated. Currently the PPC version of the Adobe Reader takes 8 Meg of memory to install and quite a bit of additional resources when it runs. However it does support reflow and does support DRM on PDF files. It is version 2 of the product and if more than twice the size of version 1 which also supported reflow but not DRM. Version 1 did have performance problems but worked and it is years old from Adobe.

Third party readers don't support it because they aren't really committed to PDF. It is just a checkmark in the list of features. Another problem is the horsepower available on E-INK readers is less than half the power available on PPC devices.

Adobe did a version of PDF reader for Palm but there was not enough horsepower on the Palm so they did the reflow on the PC and then downloaded a results file when made it non-standard. Mobipocket does a similar thing with their PDF to .prc converter that is built into their Windows Reader product.

Current Palms have enough horsepower and the only 3rd party reflowable product in existence is now a free download for Palm devices. It is called PalmPDF I believe.

Supposedly Adobe and Sony are working on a version for the PRS505 but at the consumer electronic show it was shown only doing PDF text files that had no images.

Dale

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Reflowable has been around for years from Adobe.

Since only the latest version of Acrobat (for Windows) supports it, reflowable support hasn't been around for "years".

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It does eat resources to display properly. I have not seen that the size of the file increases significantly.

I use Open Office.org to make PDFs. It supports tagged PDFs. A tagged PDF is nearly double the size of a non-tagged PDF.

Now, it could be OpenOffice's PDF creation software isn't working quite right, but it's all I have to go by since tagged PDFs are rather rare in the wild.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The bloat, if you want to call it that, is that the reader itself becomes much more complicated.

The bloat I am referring to is the PDF file itself. A document that starts off as a 300K ODF document comes to over 1000K as a non-tagged PDF and nearly 1800K as a tagged PDF. File bloat is what I'm talking about.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Third party readers don't support it because they aren't really committed to PDF.

So xpdf, an open source program for the viewing of PDFs, isn't "committed" to PDF?

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Current Palms have enough horsepower and the only 3rd party reflowable product in existence is now a free download for Palm devices. It is called PalmPDF I believe.

Tried PalmPDF. Useless for reading PDFs unless the PDF is formatted for the Palm. PalmPDF is based on xpdf and, at least the version I tried, did not support reflow.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Since only the latest version of Acrobat (for Windows) supports it, reflowable support hasn't been around for "years".

It has been around for years on PPC devices. Reflow in a big PC screen isn't really needed much.

I use Open Office.org to make PDFs. It supports tagged PDFs. A tagged PDF is nearly double the size of a non-tagged PDF.

Now, it could be OpenOffice's PDF creation software isn't working quite right, but it's all I have to go by since tagged PDFs are rather rare in the wild.

It is a problem with Open Office. Using Adobe Acrobat, Framemaker, and ActiveSync to create tagged pdf's does not increase the size significantly. Activesync, by the way, adds tags after the fact.

So xpdf, an open source program for the viewing of PDFs, isn't "committed" to PDF?



Tried PalmPDF. Useless for reading PDFs unless the PDF is formatted for the Palm. PalmPDF is based on xpdf and, at least the version I tried, did not support reflow.

PalmPDF is based on xpdf and xpdf is the best, perhaps only, support out there that is any good. I think you should download again.

Dale

[Jack B Nimble]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Since only the latest version of Acrobat (for Windows) supports it, reflowable support hasn't been around for "years".

I knew reflow was older than the latest (Acrobat 8.0) version, since we are still stuck with versions 6 and 7 here in the office and I use it regularly (much as I dislike PDF, it is pretty much required in a legal office). So, I did some looking around. According to a May 2001 review of the then-new Acrobat 5.0, reflowing text was part of the PDF 1.4 specification, and was one of several features introduced in Acrobat 5.

Jack

[ProfJulie]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Since only the latest version of Acrobat (for Windows) supports it, reflowable support hasn't been around for "years".

Five or so years ago I used Adobe Acrobat 6.0 to create PDF ebooks that could be read on a Palm or Pocket PC. Adobe makes a free PDF reader for both the Palm and the Pocket PC - these readers have been around for years. Tagging and reflowing the text portions of the books I created was very easy. The hard part was handling the diagrams and pictures in the books, but with some custom programming even those items were handled quite well. [BTW, the diagrams & pictures were also an issue in the Mobipocket version of the books I created.]

At the time, I bought a few PDF books to see how well they worked on PDAs and they reflowed just fine on both the Palm & the Pocket PC, with no additional effort from me. I could not have modified anything in these books any way since they are encrypted with DRM. If you review the document properties of the PDF files you come across "in the wild" you might be surprised to discover that more of them are tagged than you think.

The PDF format is quite versatile and perhaps that versatility leads many to believe it is not suitable for eBooks. Many people create print images of books, magazines and articles and call their creation ebooks. Furthermore, the developers of electronic book readers perpetuate this myth, either purposefully or not, by designing software that does not capitalize on a PDF eBooks tags and by not allowing these books to reflow to fit the device screen.

Most of the alternative PDF software, when compared option-by-option to Adobe Acrobat, is quite inferior. That is not Adobe's fault! These alternative PDF applications generally only offer the more popular options and don't come close to giving you everything you get with Adobe Acrobat (in that regard, you really do get what you pay for).

Even so, why blame the PDF format for this lack of understanding, lack of commitment, and lack of features of alternative PDF applications?

[ProfJulie]

Originally Posted by Jack B Nimble

I knew reflow was older than the latest (Acrobat 8.0) version, since we are still stuck with versions 6 and 7 here in the office and I use it regularly (much as I dislike PDF, it is pretty much required in a legal office). So, I did some looking around. According to a May 2001 review of the then-new Acrobat 5.0, reflowing text was part of the PDF 1.4 specification, and was one of several features introduced in Acrobat 5.

Jack

Thanks for clearing that up!

[tompe]

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

Most of the alternative PDF software, when compared option-by-option to Adobe Acrobat, is quite inferior. That is not Adobe's fault! These alternative PDF applications generally only offer the more popular options and don't come close to giving you everything you get with Adobe Acrobat (in that regard, you really do get what you pay for).

Well, they have designed the format so I think it is their fault. When I read about it a couple of months ago I got the impression that the format is not so easy to parse and handle. You could have designed it differently in a way that stimulated third parties to write good applications for it but that was not in Adobes interest when they designed the format.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It has been around for years on PPC devices. Reflow in a big PC screen isn't really needed much.

That's probably why I don't see it very much. I won't buy Microsoft products and PPC handhelds have always been poor values for me.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It is a problem with Open Office. Using Adobe Acrobat, Framemaker, and ActiveSync to create tagged pdf's does not increase the size significantly. Activesync, by the way, adds tags after the fact.

I'm finding that difficult to believe right now. According to what I've read, a tagged PDF has the content in the PDF twice. Once as the normal PDF and again as the tagged version. At the very least, it would increase the size of the PDF by the size of the original content.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

PalmPDF is based on xpdf and xpdf is the best, perhaps only, support out there that is any good. I think you should download again.

I'm already using the latest version on my PC. But, as you point out, tagged PDFs are pretty much worthless on a PC system so I wouldn't really have noticed the feature. And tagged PDFs are not common (and the fact that I usually avoid PDF anyway), the odds that I would have seen a tagged PDF in xpdf is pretty low.

In the tests that I did with OpenOffice.org, the tagged PDF and the non-tagged PDF displayed the same. The only difference was the file size.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, they have designed the format so I think it is their fault. When I read about it a couple of months ago I got the impression that the format is not so easy to parse and handle. You could have designed it differently in a way that stimulated third parties to write good applications for it but that was not in Adobes interest when they designed the format.

It isn't very easy but it is well understood. PDF is really a packaging of the PostScript language file format which has been around for ages. For example a table in PDF is built using raw lines that are displayed on a page with the text formatted individually to the xy coordinates on the page. There isn't any actual construct for the table itself.

Dale

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

Adobe makes a free PDF reader for both the Palm...

Yes, and no. Adobe makes a program (that only runs on closed, proprietary systems) that takes a PDF, reformats it into something even more useless and unreadable, and puts it into a Palm file. Then they wrote a program that runs on the Palm that can read this useless file.

Run Adobe's free reader on the Palm, then try to open a PDF you've put on your SD card. It won't work.

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

The PDF format is quite versatile and perhaps that versatility leads many to believe it is not suitable for eBooks.

No, I think it's the bloated file size (compare 300K for a mobipocket book to 1500K for the same PDF) and the fact that PDFs don't display correctly on the current crop of eBook readers (tagged or otherwise) that have led many to believe that it's not suitable.

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

Even so, why blame the PDF format for this lack of understanding, lack of commitment, and lack of features of alternative PDF applications?

I don't. I blame PDF for being a locked down, bloated format.

[pilotbob]

Here's an entry from a blog on Adobe.com that freely admits the points I was trying to make in the opening post.

http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/200...uthor_ebo.html

BOb

[ProfJulie]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Yes, and no. Adobe makes a program (that only runs on closed, proprietary systems) that takes a PDF, reformats it into something even more useless and unreadable, and puts it into a Palm file. Then they wrote a program that runs on the Palm that can read this useless file.

Run Adobe's free reader on the Palm, then try to open a PDF you've put on your SD card. It won't work.

I don't use the Palm any more, so I can't perform the test. But PDF files work just fine off an SD card on my Pocket PC. I think it is hard to assess where the deficiency lies....Is this a deficiency with Palm, with the Palm software or with the PDF format?

Originally Posted by RLAUZON

No, I think it's the bloated file size (compare 300K for a mobipocket book to 1500K for the same PDF) and the fact that PDFs don't display correctly on the current crop of eBook readers (tagged or otherwise) that have led many to believe that it's not suitable.

I have not compared a book in a Mobipocket format to the same book in a PDF format, so I can't speak to this comment, but I will look at it and see for myself if this is true. I disagree with the second sentence you state as accepted fact....I read many PDF books and they display perfectly on my Pocket PC. The fact that eBook reader devices do not accommodate tags and so cannot reflow properly is a deficiency in the eBook reader device and not with the PDF format.

Originally Posted by RLAUZON

I don't. I blame PDF for being a locked down, bloated format.

I don't think the PDF format is any more locked down than any other format. It may be bloated, but file size does not concern me that much, there are always storage cards that I can use to store my files, so I don't feel such a big need to conserve space.

To speak to an earlier point about how much larger tagged files are versus untagged files, I performed a test. I took a large PDF book that was untagged and ran Adobe Acrobat's tag option on it. The file size changed from 39,188 KB to 40,646 KB. I don't see this as a significant difference, do you?

[ProfJulie]

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, they have designed the format so I think it is their fault. When I read about it a couple of months ago I got the impression that the format is not so easy to parse and handle. You could have designed it differently in a way that stimulated third parties to write good applications for it but that was not in Adobes interest when they designed the format.

What exactly are you blaming them for? The fact that vendors don't make use of the features that are provided? The fact that people who generate PDF files don't understand the importance of tagging the file to make it accessible on different devices? I don't follow that logic.

The PDF format has been around for a very long time. It has changed (more features introduced) over time to address new uses. How can Adobe be blamed if third parties are not stimulated to write applications to use these features? We, as consumers, have quite a lot of power, don't you think? If we press the developers of these devices to give us this functionality, do you think they will be motivated then?

Before this thread, many of the readers here probably didn't even know that PDF files could be used on the current batch of ebook reader devices if only the developers would add the functionality to their respective PDF reader software.....

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

Is this a deficiency with Palm, with the Palm software or with the PDF format?

The PDF format. Since no other format has these problems.

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

I have not compared a book in a Mobipocket format to the same book in a PDF format, so I can't speak to this comment, but I will look at it and see for myself if this is true.

Now that I am home, I can do some tests. Here's the file sizes:

• Original OpenOffice.org file: 245,881 bytes (text only, no graphics)
• HTML version: 657,778 bytes (which I find to be very interesting that it's larger - but it's an OpenOffice.org export which didn't use a style sheet).
• Mobipocket version: 343,620 bytes
• Non-tagged PDF: 1,859,068 bytes
• Tagged PDF: 2,456,199

So starting with the original file:

• The HTML is 2.6 times the size.
• The Mobipocket version is 1.3 times.
• The PDF is 7.5 times.
• The tagged PDF is 9.99 times.

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

I don't think the PDF format is any more locked down than any other format.

Try to convert PDF to something else and you'll see how locked down it is.

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

It may be bloated, but file size does not concern me that much, there are always storage cards that I can use to store my files, so I don't feel such a big need to conserve space.

It's not a space issue. It's a speed issue. It's simply going to take an eBook reader 4 times longer to load a tagged PDF than a Mobipocket file. Based on my experiments, it takes far longer to turn the page in a PDF than an HTML/Mobipocket eBook (at least on my Cybook and iLiad).