Thread: Most "future proof" format?
View Single Post
Old 12-12-2008, 04:17 AM   #19
sealbeater
Banned
sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.sealbeater ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 666
Karma: 1752814
Join Date: Jan 2008
Device: Sony Reader PRS-505 : Onyx Boox Max : Sony PRS-900 : Onyx Kepler Pro
[QUOTE=HarryT;301799]Hmmm. Those are two of the worst possible choices of format, IMHO - text because if has no formatting, and PDF because it's not an eBook format at all and is tied to a fixed page size.
[Qoute]
I have literally thousands of txt files, most of which are formated quite nicely enough for me. Proper word layout is not dependent on data format. As for PDF, that's incredible to me, because pdf2txt is one of the greatest book tools I own. It's part of the reason my txt files look so good. I agree, for some multi-column texts, it's, not so good and you lose images, but CRC.Press, Oxford Press, I've got so many great looking txt files converted from PDF that I have to say, I think it's your method that's at fault. I didn't say I was loading the pdfs, I was referring to archival future proofing.

Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
Far, far better to store books in a "rich" format which can easily be converted to whatever "terminal" format one prefers for reading. I would always store books (as opposed to reading them) in a format such as HTML or RTF.
You know, you raise a very good point with this. I've certainly got nothing against HTML, and it converts beautifully to .txt as well.

As for RTF, you should probably have a bit of my background. I've been reading books on computers for over 10 years and I've been a linux user for longer than that. RTF is not the most convenient format to read on the linux console which is my preferred method of reading books on the computer (which I haven't done since I got my reader). In fact, at the time, there was not a lot of options of reading RTF files in linux. So, when I say txt and pdf for archival futureproof storage, I'm considering my own personal ease of use.

With that being said, you are absolutely right, RTF does have advantages, and I've only appreciated those metadata tags once I got my reader. It's made me regret deleting all those rtfs over the years but I don't <i>personally</i> care enough about metadata to convert anything to rtf for it. If it comes that way, good enough.
sealbeater is offline   Reply With Quote