Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
You are right, AMJB. But for electronic books, reflow formats are definitely and objectively the wrong choice... unless of course we restrict the definition of eBooks, as people presumably do here, to novels with uncomplicated layouts.
Books are supposed to be able to convey information with far greater complexity (not to mention elegance) than reflow formats will ever be able to handle. Why? Because typesetting/bookmaking is not a machine-solvable problem and thus necessarily requires human intervention/assistance.
The above are facts that I am yet to see credibly disputed by anyone, or for that matter by somebody that that seemed to understand and acknowledge the full range of issues.
None of this changes the fact that most PDFs available today are unusable on eBook devices. But, in turn, the fact that most PDFs available today are unusable doesn't change the fact that only PDFs and similarly static solutions can solve all the problems of bookmaking (electronic or otherwise) and dynamic formats will not foreseeably be able to do so until computers have basically human-equivalent level intelligence (seeing as how that is exactly what is required for typesetting/bookmaking). |
Ahi, I'd like to know what in your opinion is needed to be added to ePub to make it better typographically? I know it needs kerning and hyphenation. But what else would it need?