Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
The problem is that PDF is not an easily understood or read format for anyone with a portable device. The small screens on portable devices make reflowable documents a must, and PDF does not reflow well if at all.
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I recall in the early days that Adobe marketed PDFs as "digital paper". And, rightly enough, that's exactly what PDFs are.
They are an output format that is as excellent or as terrible as the document creator made it, and is not easily changeable after (excepting ways that are the digital equivalent of scribbling in pencil or pen on a printed sheet).
Clearly the vast majority of publishers do not know or do not consider users of eBook reading devices to be a significant target audience. Whatever the reason, this cannot last as such devices become more popular. And as they do, the quality of PDF documents will no doubt increase greatly.
Typesetting a book is a task that even today
remains too complex for a machine to do, without some human/manual help. Even LaTeX requires a human eye and human judgment on how to resolve imperfections in the best typesetting it could come up with given its internal restrictions for a given paper size and font size.
Consequently it is pretty much guaranteed that the best quality HTML or other resizeable/free-flowing realtime-typeset formats simply cannot exceed in quality the best quality PDF that a half-way competent typesetter can produce.
If eBook reading devices are ever to fully replace dead-tree books (or, at least, newly published ones), I think it could only happen via PDF or a PDF-like format for eBooks. After all, while automated impromptu-typesetting and reflowing of a typographically mundane novel may be difficult to distinguish from a properly prepared book or PDF for the untrained eye; anything typographically complex (e.g.: textbooks or newspapers) cannot simply be left to reflow as per the whims of the display device, because the quality will simply plummet. Oh, and resizeability could be addressed either the way it is with dead-tree books (i.e.: Do you buy the regular or the large-print edition?) or by means of PDFs that contain pre-defined typesetting/layouts for the same text at 2-3 specific font-sizes.
I realize that my opinions on this subject are rather on the opposite end of the spectrum from many others on this board. The gist of my view is basically that I didn't pay $300+ for an eBook reader device to start reading books that look like they were typeset in Microsoft Office. And upon (admittedly short, but more than just cursory) inspection, I do not see any of the non-PDF formats being capable of truly professional typographic presentation today or (for reasons stated and bolded above) ever.
In other words, while I recognize that an unnecessarily poor quality PDF is damn near unfixable in comparison to a necessarily limited quality Mobipocket or ePub. My preference would be for professional quality eBooks in the only format that can support them, not better handling of formats that by their very nature can never be made to produce truly professional output for all or even most content.
And, for those that think I am talking nonsense, PDF documents professionally created with LaTeX can produce proper justification via hyphenation (which regularly requires supplementation of the existing hyphenation rules), inter-letter and inter-word spacing (with paragraphs being treated as a unit, and variations being tried as to where line-breaks are inserted), and even minute and visually almost impossible to detect widening or thinning of individual characters (called microtypography in LaTeX terms). Using all these tricks, on a regular basis there still is no typographically correct way for the computer to automatically typeset the occasional paragraph to aesthetically pleasing justification... until the typesetter makes the judgment call and decides what to let the software slack off on in order to make said paragraph as close to perfect as possible. This sort of work-flow from text to typeset content is simply impossible on a device that cannot consult a human being when it "runs out of ideas". And with all of the above we are not even talking about widows, orphans, near-widows/near-orphans, pagination, ligatures, hanging bullets, and other even more subtle aesthetics that good typesetting ought to take into consideration.
Call me a crazy lunatic of a dreamer... but I think the golden age of eBook readers will start the day PDFs are recognized as the ideal eBook format
by the publishers. (As opposed to simply the easiest one to shove out the door, with little concern as to whether or not anyone will be able to read it properly.)