Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
PDF has limits as it isn't actually an ebook format. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and was never intended as an ebook format. Instead it was created so that people could access documents for business easily. So say an office in Los Angeles wants to send a document to its sister office in New York via the net. A PDF of that document is ideal for such uses. It's too rigid for an ereader (IMO) though. Sometimes the text is too light for easy reading or the text won't reflow to be easily read (i.e. font size) or you have to scroll side to side to read a given paragraph properly and that breaks the flow of the story (at least for me).
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I agree about the rigidity of PDF as an advantage when used for its intended purpose. One of the initial reasons for PDFs was that with word processing formats the document's appearance will change when the same document travels from computer to computer.
I used to work in a job where I dealt with documents from many locations, documents that had to look exactly the same as what the sender originally sent (not even a slight difference in the space between two words was allowed). Because of the issues with word processors, we had to FAX the documents back and forth to ensure that we were receiving exactly what the sender was sending us. Unfortunately, this was before PDF was available.
This is one of the main reasons I prefer PDF when it comes to ebooks I make for myself: it will look exactly as intended on my ebook reader. I use OpenOffice.org to make my ebooks and a PDF ebook will look the exactly same on my ereader as it does on my computer and I can use OpenOffice.org's formatting capabilities to format it exactly as I want.
Some have mentioned a Table of Contents (TOC) and for long e-books I prefer them just so that can quickly jump to a chapter if I choose. The rigid page numbering of PDF works well since I can easily generate a TOC that I insert after the title page. For simplicity I prefer just a TOC without links. I go to the TOC, look up the page number, and then jump to that page just like with a paper book.
The one ebook format I miss is .pdb, used for Palm PDA ebooks. While the format was fairly simple (it was basically a combination of plain text and HTML), it was easy to work with and rendered reliably on any Palm PDA (while the formatting of the ebook was handled by the .pdb format, the typeface was chosen by the user on their PDA based on the typefaces they have loaded). All you needed to make the ebook was a simple program that converted the file into a .pdb file.