Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
I recall in the early days that Adobe marketed PDFs as "digital paper". And, rightly enough, that's exactly what PDFs are. [...]
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. [...]
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I agree with you 100%.
Quote:
[...] 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.
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Again, I agree with you 100%! This is exactly why I prefer the PDF format (if they remain faithful to the the book design or the intended design). And this is why all of my digital books are in PDF formats which remain faithful, to the original printed book.
I agree with everything you've said thus far about why PDF or PDF-like format is ideal. All the other formats are totally unappealing to me including the ability for the end-user to substitute one font for the other. In another thread, I said that that ability is akin to saying a seven-year old who consider her or himself an expert in finger painting to be now an expert in making paintings like Van Gogh. Fact of the matter is that most end-users are not experts in typesetting and book design. In fact, even though I have done some book design, layout and a bit of typesetting, I will still claim to be fairly ignorant about the art even though many people who have seen what I have designed consider what I've done beautiful when I consider it fairly amateurish. And that's because they don't know much about design!
I also want to compliment you on your very well-spoken post. It's much better written and argued than what I've written on the topic.