Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
It's simple: PDFs optimized for a given device are the best-looking and most usable format out there. PDFs optimized for a different device and screen size are the least usable and worst-looking format out there. They're generally either perfect or worthless with no middle ground. That's one reason so many people don't like PDFs - as the old Klingon (SFB version) Proverb says "Perfect is the enemy of good enough."
For many the difference between a good PDF and a reflowable format is not as great as that between an unsuitable PDF and a reflowable format. It's a matter of priorities: which is more important? Having the very best, or not having the very worst?
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This is the truth - PDFs break badly on the wrong screen size. Expecting all ebooks to converge on a single (large) screen size to solve the problem is naieve.
LDBoblo's dedication to beautiful presentation is commendable, but it sounds to me that he reads more magazines than paperbacks. In the former (or with technical manuals) layout is far, far more important than the latter. That's not to diminish the importance of good typesetting in traditional books, but the 'good enough' of reflowable formats can get close enough to best practice that only the most pedantic readers will notice the difference. Reflow engines are still improving, but the state of the art is getting pretty good.
In any of these discussions it seems important to make some distinction between the different uses for ebooks. Leisure reading, english literature, foreign language, big fonts for poor vision, technical manuals, office documents, academic text, web feeds and annotations all present different issues and cannot,
will not be solved by a single technology, however good it might be.
But really, PDF is not a good format for ebooks.
