PDF is a display format. Whatever other gimmicks it was taught in recent times, its chief virtue--despite also being the biggest complaint against it on the mobileread forums--is that whatever you "(type)set" on it stays set, where it is, as it is.
My personal hope and prophecy is that once the technology matures:
- eBook readers will be more or less uniform in their screen size--about 6 inches by 9 inches or so should do it--and PDF eBooks will be specifically formatted with that in mind.
or, if screen size does not become sufficiently standard, then:
- PDFs will support not font resizing, but rather the containment of multiple version of the same document but in different versions (like different font-sizes), giving the reader a choice and/or deciding based on factors like the display device's characteristics which version to display.
A reflowed novel with nothing but (typographically) dull old paragraphs might look more or less the same and equally readable at all font sizes; but anything typographically more complex really does have to be typeset for the destination format (i.e.: display size) to work.
Electronic book readers will have to either become standardized enough for sound typesetting (necessarily PDF or something very like it) to be trivially achievable with published eBooks (i.e.: generating from the same master as the dead-tree version, just tweaked)... or they'll never gain widespread use (or, at least, not more widespread use than dead-tree books).
I say this because I see humanity (or even just its affluent portions thereof) neither willing to abandon the several hundred years (if not more) developed art of typography (whose main goal, by the way, is to
enhance readability), nor willing to primitivise all future books (e.g.: think text books, magazines, poetry, illustrated stories, pages with embedded quotes, marginal notes, et al) so that eBook readers' automatic reflow cannot butcher them too badly.
When PDF fails for people with eBook readers, it fails not because it isn't the right format (unless, of course, their reading device altogether does not support it) but because proper care was not taken by the publisher or eBook maker to customize it for their display device. Or because the person needs what is essentially a large print edition, and, again, the person making the PDF did not take the additional 2-20 minutes to create it. (Yesterday I created 8 custom PDFs that cover most 2nd generation devices in about 2 hours, with a workflow figured out as I went:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=47316 )
My 0.02€.
- Ahi