[NatCh]

Originally Posted by akiburis

Well, for example, their inability to render properly spaced and hyphenated justified text (or, for that matter, properly spaced and hyphenated unjustified text). This really does make a difference for me in the pleasure and ease of reading. I dislike reading ragged-right text generally and wildly ragged text always, and justified text without hyphenation is pretty unpleasant too---at least, I'm not inclined to settle for such things if I can have something better. I don't think this is a matter of being especially sensitive to nuances.

Perhaps I expressed myself poorly, I did not mean to suggest that you were oversensitive, only that I was less sensitive to such things. Perhaps "inattentive" would be a better description of my own perceptions.

In any case, I see now what you're saying about the greater care for the actual layout that you get with a well-done PDF, and I'd agree with you that it's cleaner than what you get form most (if not all) e-book reading apps. It's a valid point, even though I find it less compelling than you do, if only because that careful work would need to be done for each target display size. It may not be a big deal for one size, but it gets pretty burdensome for multiple sizes.

Originally Posted by akiburis

My perspective may differ from many people's in that I have no particular preference for ebooks per se versus paper books. But there's lots of digital text around, LCDs do not make for comfortable sustained reading, and printing the stuff out is expensive and unsatisfactory (my cheap laser printer isn't a printing press and bookbinding machine, after all); so I find a device like the Sony reader really useful for displaying digital text. Often, if it's worth it, formatted (typeset) with LaTeX and PDF output. Often the plain text is enough for my purposes or the plain text minimally formatted in Word and converted to RTF. But rather than depend on the Reader's rather weird plain text and RTF handling, I export that stuff to PDF, too, before loading it onto the Reader, to preserve the formatting. That's exactly what PDF is useful to me for, and why the device would be more or less useless to me without decent PDF support.

Yes, it's extremely useful as you describe. There are trade-offs to that approach (just like everything else in the world), but you've clearly decided that what you lose is less important to you than what you've gained. Good for you.

Originally Posted by akiburis

Now, what gets my goat about all this anti-PDF rant is that it seems to be meant to deprive me---if the ranters (excuse me) had their way---of something that I find very useful and, at present anyway, irreplaceable.

Great googely-moogely, no! Not in the least do we want to abolish PDF format. Shucks, I don't even want to remove support for it from the Reader, or anything else! It is, as you say, irreplaceable for certain purposes. I don't think anyone is arguing for its abolition.

This wasn't even meant to be a rant! Only a discussion of the suitability of PDF format as an e-book format. I phrased it like I did to catch interest and get folks discussing the matter to see what interesting perspectives might come out of it, that's all.

Originally Posted by akiburis

And the anti-PDF arguments are all hooey.

Well, that's certainly a matter of opinion. I did mention that the whole discussion was within the realm of opinion, didn't I?

Certainly, you have every right to consider the views of others uncompelling, but they have as much right to hold them as you do to not hold them, right?

Originally Posted by akiburis

PDF is, everyone incessantly insists, a terrible format for ebooks because it was never meant for ebooks and is a terrible format for ebooks---a circular, question-begging argument if ever there was one. Or, because ebooks are a new digital technology, they must by some technological imperative be different in every way from paper books---that is really what a lot of these arguments come down to, it seems to me.

I'm sorry, but you lost me here, I've not seen anyone arguing any of this.

Seems to me the majority "no" opinion that has been expressed is more that the undeniable strengths that PDF has, the things it does so well, aren't compatible with what those particular folks want from an e-book. That is to say that the excellent job it does of preserving formatting is less important to those individuals than the ability of an e-book to adapt to whatever display size is being used.

I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anyone suggesting that PDF is too old-fashioned to be used for e-books.

Originally Posted by akiburis

In either case, however, it's assumed, not in any way demonstrated, that an ebook must be such-and-such, and it follows that no one must want or be allowed to have any other sort of ebook or ebook format or ebook device. All petty totalitarian fantasy, in my view.

Hardly! This entire discussion is, at its core, a facet of what people want their e-books to do, not what they must be. Yes people are speaking from pre-conceptions, but I don't think those preconceptions are assumptions of what e-books should or must be. In any case, I don't see where anybody is suggesting that there can only be one solution.



I'm very sorry if we gave that impression, I really don't believe it was intended. I can only speak definitively for myself, of course, but I most definitely did not mean to suggest any such thing. I apologize for inadvertently giving that impression, as I evidently have.



In any case, please, let's all now consider it expressly appended to the whole premise of the discussion that we're not aiming to abolish nor institute any given format as a single solution within the confines of this discussion.

If anyone does want to have that discussion, start another thread, there's plenty of space for another one.