Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
Because:
1. Reflowable PDFs are something that's very new and not all PDF creation software supports that feature. When they do, they create a PDF that is even more bloated than the non-reflow PDF.
2. Since reflowable PDFs are new, most readers don't support them. I believe that only Acrobat supports the format - and then only for Microsoft products. So even if reflowable PDFs were created, they couldn't be used.
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Reflowable has been around for years from Adobe. It does eat resources to display properly. I have not seen that the size of the file increases significantly. The bloat, if you want to call it that, is that the reader itself becomes much more complicated. Currently the PPC version of the Adobe Reader takes 8 Meg of memory to install and quite a bit of additional resources when it runs. However it does support reflow and does support DRM on PDF files. It is version 2 of the product and if more than twice the size of version 1 which also supported reflow but not DRM. Version 1 did have performance problems but worked and it is years old from Adobe.
Third party readers don't support it because they aren't really committed to PDF. It is just a checkmark in the list of features. Another problem is the horsepower available on E-INK readers is less than half the power available on PPC devices.
Adobe did a version of PDF reader for Palm but there was not enough horsepower on the Palm so they did the reflow on the PC and then downloaded a results file when made it non-standard. Mobipocket does a similar thing with their PDF to .prc converter that is built into their Windows Reader product.
Current Palms have enough horsepower and the only 3rd party reflowable product in existence is now a free download for Palm devices. It is called PalmPDF I believe.
Supposedly Adobe and Sony are working on a version for the PRS505 but at the consumer electronic show it was shown only doing PDF text files that had no images.
Dale