Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
For smaller screens, PDF is still great, as the new mobile SDK can reflow.
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More accurately, it can reflow
some PDF documents, and only the text of those documents. Adobe has extensions to allow PDF documents to reflow more easily, but (a) the overwhelming majority of existing PDF documents do not contain reflow information nor do most PDF-producing software emit them; and (b) the current Adobe Mobile SDK doesn't actually use the reflow tagging! (I wish I could find the blog/forum post, but one of the Adobe developers mentioned that they had better luck at the moment just ignoring the tags and reflowing as they could.)
This means that PDF reflow can only reflow pure text, and even that with quite mixed results. The current state of PDF reflow on the Sony Reader is a good example -- line breaks appear at awkward places, words not properly re-joined over cross-line hyphenation, paragraph breaks missed, images awkwardly sized, captions divorced from their figures, headers & footers mixed into the text, and so on. PDF reflow allows the document text to be viewed, but not attractively or even always coherently.
The only ways to change that are either (a) incorporate a superb complete layout analysis engine into the PDF renderer, essentially doing all the work of a commercial OCR engine except for actually recognizing individual characters (or perhaps even that, in the case of image PDFs); or (b) extend the PDF format with so much reflow tagging information that it essentially becomes a new reflowable format.
I don't doubt that people prefer PDF due to familiarity and attractiveness of the results of display-size-optimized output, but that doesn't mean that it's an optimal format for targeting the vast number different display sizes people are and will be reading books on.