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Originally Posted by HarryT
Hadrien,
The issue I have with PDFs is that they are non-editable documents. Eg, most people seem to like "Serif" (Roman) fonts in documents, but I prefer "Sans Serif" (Swiss/Arial) fonts when reading. With an RTF, if I don't like the font, I load it into Word and change it (or rather I run Stingo's macro which does all the work for me); with PDF, I'm stuck with what's there.
I accept the enormous benefits of PDF for books which need a TOC and/or pictures, but for straightforward "fiction" that you just read from end to end, I completely fail to see the benefits.
Is there some "hidden benefit" of PDF that I'm missing?
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Well, what you said isn't much of a problem in our case. Since we generate PDF files instead of storing them, you could generate them in any font or size that you'd like.
And yes, there's benefits:
- Embedded fonts
- Support for any language
- Images (you can display math formulas too for example, needed for scientific documents)
- Table of contents
- Real footnotes
- Better overall presentation
It's not much flexible once you've got the file, that's why you have to make it more flexible before you output the PDF. That's what we're trying to do here (well anyone can already do it with LaTeX, but we're trying to make something available and easy to use for everyone).