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There are several things which are needed and it should be admitted up front that a couple of problems are intractable and will not be generally solved:
- First, .pdfs need to be available at size(s) which are optimized for screen size(s) / proportions
- second, .pdfs need to have internal tagging so that _under user control_ they can be re-flowed at need, or read audibly by a screen reader &c. --- note that this includes additional manual formatting to indicate break points which must not be allowed, as well as suggestions on where breaks are allowable
- third, viewing programs need to have more sophisticated algorithms for re-flowing text, considering not just an entire paragraph, but an entire page (until such time as there're widely available dual-screen readers at which point one will need to consider a spread)
- while widows and orphans can be precluded by appropriate settings in a tools like TeX, other aspects of line-breaking / hyphenation and paragraph and page building / composition are more intractable --- it's incredibly difficult to anticipate and prevent stacks for example, and if there're figures or tables w/ matching references, showing these on a page together can sometimes require re-laying an entire chapter
Granted, for straight text, w/ a simpler format, one can achieve a very usable result just by tying together words strategically w/ non-breaking spaces and setting sensible defaults, but it would be terribly limiting if ebooks were to adhere to the limitations imposed by such --- there was a time when writers would naturally switch from writing to drawing and back in a given text and ebooks should allow such flexibility.
William
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