Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
@gmw, You've got a lot to learn about ebooks and readers. I personally think a background image will make the reading horrible on the eyes of most, but it might work for you. And why in the world would you want to use PDF, EVER. You can change the font sizes for ePubs via the CSS or using calibre.
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I certainly do have a lot to learn - which is why I have spent as much time as I have experimenting with the device (believe it or not I do actually have other things I could be doing). Whether the background image will help or hinder ... well I wont know unless I try it.
Why would I use PDF? I can think of various reasons:
- It is a much more mature technology and there are many tools available to dealing with PDFs, whereas epub is recent - and while it may be based on xhtml is obviously not mature yet, as the shortcomings in the epub viewing software amply demonstrate.
(The following reasons are possibly just consequences of the first one...)
- I can create PDFs easily using a "printer" on my computer, printing to a 9cm by 12cm page produces PDF documents ready to go on the reader - and this can be done from any application, I don't have to be an xhtml/css expert to do it.
- If I should want, I can produce documents with a fixed appearance - something that is predictable regardless of the screen/device.
- I am familiar with working with PDFs
- I have read that others here have found more success with PDFs than with other formats, perhaps for some of the reasons I state here.
All that said: Yes, I can certainly see the
potential advantages of the epub format, and it was my first choice. However, as I've already noted here and elsewhere, the reader produces a "small" that is too small and a "medium" that is too large -
for my preferences. You are right, I could go into Calibre and produce a CSS that fixes the font to a specific size, but then that rather defeats one of the big reasons for using epub. Once the technology matures a bit more I expect epub will be quite good and believe it is probably "the one to watch" with regard to novels and such on readers.
But I do believe that PDF has it's place, even on ebook readers, I do not think it appropriate to be as dismissive of that technology as your post seemed to suggest.