Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
I don't understand the point.
Take a non-image PDF and open it on your PC. Now, zoom in. The text stays nice and crisp.
Similarly, the Adobe Mobile SDK 9 reflows simple text, and allows enlarging the font. But it also can deal with complex, fixed layouts, where required.
So, what exactly is the problem?
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Take a "typical" non-image PDF and open it on your "3.5 in. screen PDA or smartphone". Don't assume ebook customers are willing to shell out $300 for a single purpose device with questionable useful life and deliberately limited capabilities.
Assume most users don't have access to a SDK, nor do they care to. Note that most publishers wouldn't know how to set up a properly tagged, reflowable ebook if their lives depended on it, and most don't care, because they're paper oriented. Add in the fact that most folks really don't care about kerning, hyphenation, w&o, and ligatures, they just want to find out if Lord Hunkly manages to rip Goody Hottwif's bodice in chapter 5. Flush left/ragged right text is fine for them.
They don't really care where the page breaks fall, because they're reading text segmented by chapters anyway. They would like to be able to set serif vs. sans serif type and text size to fit their personal preference, screen characteristics, and/or visual capabilities. That's one reason they like ebooks better than paper ones.
With those givens, PDF is not a usable ebook format. In fact, it's a damned annoying format, because some ebooks people might really want to read are locked up in it and not easily transferrable to the portable devices that many people use for reading in the real world.
Regards,
Jack Tingle