Quote:
Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern
Seems to me that PDF is a very flexible format which however has not been taken advantage of fully for the digital reader world.
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PDF is a somewhat-flexible format that has not been taken advantage of fully, in part because most publishers are oblivious to any goal other than "make the screen look like the paper."
PDFs, at their best, are still page-locked; content is assigned to a particular page, which means reflow is always going to get occasional very short pages.
Reflow also changes layout of graphics & text; text layout may not matter (nobody really cares if you lose the centering on the chapter titles), but graphic layout can get very odd, depending on what program made the PDF.
PDFs made from Word/RTF documents tend to work fine on ebook readers. PDFs made from InDesign or QuarkXpress can be difficult, especially if they include a lot of charts or graphics. PDFs made from publisher's proprietary software may be pretty much unviewable except at full page size.