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Originally Posted by SpiderMatt
How can I argue from any other? Most people who use PDFs are "end users." We're talking about consumers using PDFs as ebooks, which is the only perspective I have. I find Acrobat Pro to be useful and easy to use. I have no problem converting and reformating PDFs.
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Yes but today, end users use ebooks just as they use pbooks and PDF will not let you go beyond that usage model.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpiderMatt
Not being a programmer, you'd have to explain your position here a bit for me to fully understand. As a normal user, I have no problem with processing, extracting, indexing, or transforming. Granted, I understand your beef against page images, but I avoid page images whenever possible. I fully agree that page images remove most advantages to ebooks. I like reflowable PDF files, however, and find few disadvantages when compared to other formats. I think different formats have different advantages, however. For plain text, I will use rtf for my Reader. But sometimes I want a specific format (generally something I use for articles I copy from the Internet), which PDFs are good for.
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For e.g. suppose I write a cool little web app that wants to "mangle" poems, i.e. extract stanzas from different poems and combine them into a new poem. Now if all my poems were in PDF files I'd have no way of knowing what a stanza is, beyond using some sort of hackish heuristic based on blank lines. This is because the poem is "rendered" in the PDF file and really the only way to identify semantic elements like a "stanza" is to have an entity as intelligent as a human look at the rendered poem.
And as for your claim of being able to process, extract content from a PDF. Can you extract the content from a letter sized PDF and create a non image based 6" inch PDF from it easily? If you can I'd really like to know how. And by easily I mean automatically, in no more than 5 minutes.