Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
What if you make a PDF sized for the screen? Make one for the 6" screen, the 5" screen, the 7" and the 9.7" screen and you have it. And it should not be too much extra work given that this is PDF.
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It depends on the content of the book.
Many books aren't problems. They are simple single column volumes which may have embedded in-line illustrations. But it that case, it's possible to create PDFs with the tagging to permit the PDF viewer to reflow the text to fit the screen (assuming the device you use has a PDF viewer that supports it.)
The use case I was discussing was the textbook, which is typically two column, with illustrations, sidebars, and footnotes. How do you scale that to fit a smaller screen and keep it readable?
Another poster advocated simplifying the layout of the textbook to not use such stuff, and make it easier to have the same source become both paper and electronic documents. Unfortunately, that founders on content.
As an example, I'm reading a volume on Italian art in the period from 1600-1750. It uses dual columns, and has a plethora of footnotes, a bibliography, and an index, as well as embedded illustrations. It's a trade paperback with 668 pages, of which 505 are text and images, and the rest are footnotes, index, etc. It's dual column, set in Monophoto Eckhardt, in what looks to be 8pt type.
It you tried to recast that as one column, it would be a
much fatter book. You couldn't maintain the font size in one column at over twice the width, as it would be too hard to read. The eye would lose track of where it was on the page. You would have to use a larger font size, and increase the page count. That costs.
The dual column layout is generally part of a strategy to get more text on the page while maintaining readability.
In an electronic version, it doesn't matter, as the file can be however large it needs to be to contain the required number of pages. In a print version, it does matter.
But this puts you in the position of having to create and maintain two very different output formats from the same source, which again adds to cost.
For something like a novel (once InDesign gets more support for ePub output), Save As PDF for the printer, and Save As ePub for ebook becomes an effective strategy. For other forms of content, things get trickier.
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Dennis