Thread: Why epub (mobi, etc)?
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Old 05-11-2013, 02:30 AM   #18
toddos
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill View Post
PDF seems to do everything that ePub/MOBI does and adds consistent formatting. The problem is that it's a page description language. Describing a page doesn't work that well when the page can range from less than 4" to over 10".
Huh? PDF doesn't do nearly all that epub/mobi does. At best, if the PDF is tagged properly, it will allow text reflow to fit variable page sizes. But good luck with changing font face or size, or margins, or line spacing.

PDF, as you pointed out, is a page description language. It's best suited for typesetting documents intended for paper, not for digital reading. HTML, on the other hand (the language behind epub and mobi) was designed first and foremost for flexible rendering. What you lose in pixel-perfect page layout, you gain tenfold or more in actual functionality.

Epub2 and mobi are great for narrative fiction/non-fiction. Where they fall down (mostly due to reader implementaiton) is technical books with lots of footnotes, side bars, and complex layouts. Thankfully, epub3 and KF8 address most of those concerns, and are gaining more widespread adoption. There will come a day relatively soon that PDF will no longer be necessary for anything.

Quote:
It is possible to blend the two. That's sort-of what TeX does. Yet anyone who has used TeX can relay the horrors of describing a document that renders properly at one page size, never mind multiple page sizes.
That's not quite right. TeX/LaTeX is a primary or intermediate format, not a final format like PDF or PS or epub or mobi. TeX/LaTeX vs PDF is like a word processor/RTF vs epub. You write your manuscript using TeX/LaTeX or RTF, but you publish it in PDF or epub. TeX/LaTeX can generate many different outputs (postscript or pdf for printing, html/sgml, etc), and in fact I'm sure there are plenty of epub/mobi books that were generated from TeX/LaTeX manuscripts. The biggest hurdle right now is that epub2 does not offer any mechanism for displaying mathematical equations (TeX's forte; epub2 doesn't support MathML). That's addressed in epub3, though.
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