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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
LRF simply supports more features than any other reflowable format short of full-blown HTML+CSS. RTF might actually support most of the same feature set, but I find its design to be a nightmare (I know because I've tried writing parsers for RTF). LRF on the other hand is based on an XML format, so writing parsers for it is relatively easy, I know, because I've written one.
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OK. That's the sort of comment I was looking for.
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PDF is not reflowable and was never intended to be reflowable. It's just not an ebook format. And PDF tends to be a blackhole, once content ends up in PDF it almost never escapes from it.
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Which is another reason I prefer to get content in any other format. I see PDF as a portable, device independant format for data whose final destination is intended to be a printed page.
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The "doc" format is again technically inferior, in fact because it's plain text, I dont see it ever becoming a dominant ebook format. However, the format I was talking about is prc which became mobi which became azw.
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Again, the advantage to plain text is that just about anything can display it. The disadvantage is the limit on what there is to display.
PRC is simply a Palm "resource" database (and the format is also used for programs). Mobi chose to use it for documents on a Palm platform. Most document viewers use PDB. But the PRC is simply the container, because PalmOS requires that
everything in RAM be in Palm Database format. What's in that container is another matter.
As I understand it, Mobi is a markup language, along the lines of the Palm Markup Language used by PalmReader/eReader. Viewers that can display it have been implemented on a variety of other platforms besides Palm.
If LRF is superior, the next step will be creation of viewers for LRF files for other devices besides Sony Readers.
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Even if epub doesn't take off, SONY is still left with LRF which thanks to community efforts is still the most "open" format out there. I define "openness" in an operational sense. i.e. there are open cross-platform tools to get content in and out of the format. SONY got this advantage because it was a first mover.
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And I gather Sony provided sufficient technical information that third parties
could write tools to create and manipulate LRF files.
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Dennis