Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I'm strongly in favor of this. I haven't really looked at ePub because I can't create them myself; I tried eCub and it scrambled things. I'd love to have a "push to create ePub" plugin--or even stand-alone program--that'd work with Word docs or RTFs. (Or even HTML, although my HTML creation is shaky at best.)
It'd help, but it wouldn't replace PDFs. EPub is not a print-ready format.
I work in litigation support & digital archiving. This last week & a half, a team of three of us scanned ~80,000 pages of archives for a medical firm and converted them to PDFs. They aren't being OCR'd or converted to ebook formats; they're going into a database somewhere in case the physical files are damaged. And they'll possibly be available online for some of their employees, who might need to reprint "the January '02 emails & certifications for creating the lab in Mayberry."
EPub can't replace the corporate & litigation uses of PDF, which means that PDF "ebooks" will remain simple to use for most people.
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i agree with you that pdf remains the best format for a lot of specific uses, and notably for print use. when i prepare a document for a printer, i give him a pdf. i'd never give him an epub. but they're two separate (and complementary) areas. pdf is great at things epub could never do ; epub is brilliant at thinks pdf does not that well or not at all. for reading on a device, give me epub any day ; for locking down a page layout for print work, or for archives of paper documents, or for ease of use for non-tech-savvy users, pdf won't be replaced any time soon. the only time it gets tricky is that some of their uses tend to overlap (ebooks), and even for them, in some specific cases (those you named, and also some kinds of complex page layout that you specifically *don't* want to reflow (code, equations...) pdf is good. it's not good at reflowing though, but that's not what it was made to do (quite the opposite). it's very good at what it was made to do.