Thread: PDF is not an eBook format
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Old 04-16-2008, 11:55 AM   #21
ProfJulie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon View Post
Since only the latest version of Acrobat (for Windows) supports it, reflowable support hasn't been around for "years".
Five or so years ago I used Adobe Acrobat 6.0 to create PDF ebooks that could be read on a Palm or Pocket PC. Adobe makes a free PDF reader for both the Palm and the Pocket PC - these readers have been around for years. Tagging and reflowing the text portions of the books I created was very easy. The hard part was handling the diagrams and pictures in the books, but with some custom programming even those items were handled quite well. [BTW, the diagrams & pictures were also an issue in the Mobipocket version of the books I created.]

At the time, I bought a few PDF books to see how well they worked on PDAs and they reflowed just fine on both the Palm & the Pocket PC, with no additional effort from me. I could not have modified anything in these books any way since they are encrypted with DRM. If you review the document properties of the PDF files you come across "in the wild" you might be surprised to discover that more of them are tagged than you think.

The PDF format is quite versatile and perhaps that versatility leads many to believe it is not suitable for eBooks. Many people create print images of books, magazines and articles and call their creation ebooks. Furthermore, the developers of electronic book readers perpetuate this myth, either purposefully or not, by designing software that does not capitalize on a PDF eBooks tags and by not allowing these books to reflow to fit the device screen.

Most of the alternative PDF software, when compared option-by-option to Adobe Acrobat, is quite inferior. That is not Adobe's fault! These alternative PDF applications generally only offer the more popular options and don't come close to giving you everything you get with Adobe Acrobat (in that regard, you really do get what you pay for).

Even so, why blame the PDF format for this lack of understanding, lack of commitment, and lack of features of alternative PDF applications?
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