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At the newspaper I work at, we reflow every story on every page every night, using quark and indesign. People keep changing their mind about what to say or how to say it, etc etc. So it's not like these programs are incapable of reflow. We do it until the last possible moment - we then commit to a fixed pagination.
We re-h&j constantly, which is part of the promise of ebooks - they'll re-h&j on the fly, allowing the end reader to pick type sizes, margins, interline spacing, fonts, etc. I got Dad a Kindle so he make the type big enough that he could actually see it again. A good thing.
At the moment, the state of the art in e-book reading software seems to be around circa 1990 html processing: small-medium-large print, only limited size/resolution pictures on a separate line, very limited typographical nuance available (kerning, hyphenation, etc). Not a lot of design available - if the cohice is to read a hardbound book or a dot-matrix printout of the book which would you choose? There is, I believe, value to being able to present more than just the straight word-content of books. Design matters.
The question is can the so-called "big-league" pagination programs be used for ebooks, as they can bring a lot of things to the table.
So far, the answer is "bleah". There being no shortage of what I can't do with indesign, I'll concede early that maybe I just don't know how - it's just not obvious.
So, back to my original question (with a slight addendum): Over mobipocket format, epub will astonish me by demonstrating..........?????? (that's yer cue)........
-bjc
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