Quote:
Originally Posted by Alfy
But if my understanding of PDF format is correct, it's just text and pictures which are encapsulated using page structures and tags to "fix" the exact look. Unless the document has an exceptionally complicated layout, would it not be easy for the PRS505's software to simply remove the tags to generate a simple flow?
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Many documents are nearly that simple. But PostScript (and its descendent, PDF) are really fully general page description languages. That means, among other things, that any glyph can be placed at any location on the page, in any size, rotation, thickness, etc. And there's a very rich language for computing those locations. In PostScript, it's turing-complete (that is, you can use it to compute anything you can compute in any ordinary programming language). I'm not sure whether PDF is quite that complex. In any case, the simplest PDF files might not be difficult to de-tag and reflow, but add in even a little of that complexity and it gets a whole lot more difficult.
PDF really wasn't originally designed for reflow. It's really a page description language. Period.
Xenophon
P.S. I invite more knowledgeable geeky types to correct any mistakes I've made in this explanation.