I'm not talking about a change in underlying document format. I'm talking about why at this point PDF still trumps ePub format when talking about faithfulness to design.
It shouldn't be up to the software display program to determine whether the "fi" should be ligatured. This should be a decision made by the human who creates the document. There are instances when "fi" should NOT be ligatured because the font is inappropriate to do so, or the presentation of the text does not call for ligatured glyphs. In certain scientific technical documents, I don't see ligatures being useful.
If we are depending on reader software to determine whether ligatures should or should not happen, it's like the problem with Microsoft Word's autoformat which is unfortunately mostly a hinderance because it cannot interpret the context in which we are working in and thus does not know whether we want something formatted in x-style or y-style.
The reason PDF trumps other digital formats that I know of is precisely because of its superiority in display presentation. That's basically it for me. The PDF format doesn't determine whether some is kerned so or ligatured so, because it's all set up by the human being (or the human-software interaction) PRIOR to the creation of the PDF.
PDF format continues to change. There are different versions of PDF (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Versions) Furthermore, PDF can reflow but this depends on if the person creating the PDF is savvy in using the accessibility features. Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Accessibility.
Or better yet, let me quote at length form Wikipedia:
Quote:
Moreover, tagged PDFs can be re-flowed and magnified for readers with visual impairments [emphasis mine]. Problems remain with adding tags to older PDFs and those that are generated from scanned documents. In these cases, accessibility tags and re-flowing are unavailable, and must be created either manually or with OCR techniques. These processes are inaccessible to some disabled people. PDF/UA, the PDF/Universal Accessibility Committee, an activity of AIIM, is working on a specification for PDF accessibility based on the PDF 1.6 specification.
One of the major problems with PDF accessibility is that PDF documents have three distinct views, which, depending on the document's creation, can be inconsistent with each other. The three views are (i) the physical view, (ii) the tags view, and (iii) the content view. The physical view is displayed and printed (what most people consider a PDF document). The tags view is what screen readers read (useful for people with poor eyesight). The content view is displayed when the document is re-flowed to Acrobat (useful for people with mobility disability). For a PDF document to be accessible, the three views must be consistent with each other.
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Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Accessibility