Quote:
Originally Posted by Toxaris
The major gripe with PDF is that it is not suitable for e-book due to the fixed pages. It is an intermediate format for printing in my opinion. You cannot search (normally), change the font-size and so on. That makes it no so suitable for a lot of manuals/guides/technical documents.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
Toxaris hits the nail on the head. PDF is built for PRINT. It was designed for a certain page size, and it was built to be a completely fixed format and LOOK THE SAME NO MATTER THE DEVICE. This means that the device you want to read on "MUST BE THIS LARGE". So a PDF designed for a book size, trying to be read on a smaller device (like an ereader or a phone), get a horrible experience.
Since your medium is FIXED (you know the page size, you know the margins, you know the font-size, you know the fonts being used, ...), you can get away with doing more complex typography. But once you start changing page sizes/changing things around, you will have to redo a lot of those typographical tweaks.
PDFs are also horrible for vision impaired users (Large Print Edition of books, IF the company decides to make them (which most don't)), and pretty poor for readers who are blind.
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Apparently neither of you have used a good PDF reader app on a tablet such as the iPad. You can certainly search normally, you can resize, you can reframe and so on.
In fact one of the problems with the use of images for display and in some cases inline equations is that they don't resize when the font is resized in a Kindle or ePub. Further, the images have a white background which works lousy when switching to inverted or sepia background in a Kindle reader. So the one of the major features of mobi / ePub - user controlled reflowable text is defeated by these very practices of converting materials using images for mathematical content.
My comments are concerning mathematical content and the non-use and non-support of MathML or similar. ePub with MathML on a supporting reader is quite reasonable but that's not going to happen with legacy books for which the most effective solution from the point of view of the user, is properly OCR'd PDF from scans.
I think this knee jerk response that PDF is for print and can only give a poor user experience on a tablet is indicative of lack of experience with tablets the size of the iPad and proper reader software.
Of course on a phone or a phablet - these are too small; however, they are also worthless for reading junk ePub or mobi formatted mathematical content which was my original topic.
There are certainly quite a number of authors who do their own typesetting in LaTeX and such and are quite disturbed at the loss of fidelity that occurs with current approaches to creating ePub and mobi versions from material that is laboriously typeset by the authors not the publishers.
I understand that publishers deal with typesetting text books for public schools and lower division college / university textbooks but most of the technical material from publishers such as Springer and Elsevier and their imprints is typeset by the authors.
Typesetting of technical material is part of the communication act and dumbing down the typesetting degrades the content.