[frabjous]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Let's use each format for what it's good at.
Pdf as a source for paper print, ePub Mobi and other for e-books.

Well if those were good formats. ePub is OK, but frankly, the mobi format I personally consider unusable because of its limitations.

Yeah, pdf is good for all the typo stuff, but then, who care ? What i want is my e-book to be readable. And the small text in pdf in no go for that.

The file format has nothing to do with the size of the text.

As to having different pdf for different screen size, the publisher won't bother proofreading even one e-book...

Once again, the publishers won't proofread one e-book. So asking them to proffed that many version would be suicide.

They don't have to proofread each one separately -- they'll still be using the same source document for each of the sizes. All they need to do is use templates with the right settings, and all should go well. Sure, they should quickly visibly inspect each page of the output to make sure nothing unexpected happened, but it's still doable.

I'm self-re-publishing a public domain book as an e-book in my spare time, something a number of MR members do, and I've created it in 10 different formats, including 6 differently sized PDFs. All six are based on the same source; I don't need to proofread them separately. The amount of work involving in adding a size is negligible once you've got the first one proofread. It's a trivial matter of changing some settings, which takes seconds, and recompiling the source. It is worth paging through the output to make sure the new page size didn't do anything unexpected, but it's not as if doing this is going to introduce new typos or grammatical errors.

In any case, if I can do this in my free time by myself for no money at all, publishers can do it.

ePub can use images, different fonts, tables. Html and css allows for almost anything.

It's not really that there's anything wrong with html itself as a source code; it's just that there are no existing rendering engines that can do as well as TeX does with .tex source code. As source does, TeX and HTML are barely distinguishable, although TeX does have a lot more options for mathematics and technical fields than HTML does. HTML, e.g., with MathML does could be expanded to include it. Fine. It's still reinventing the wheel, as noted above, when we have an excellent rendering engine for TeX source already.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

You're trying to fix the old, rather than improve the new.
ePub is not perfect, far from it, but it have advantage pdf will never have (openness and ease of editing). And it can still be improved.
And an other thing, when doing a mobi -> ePub conversion, it works fine. With pdf, it get a mess because pdf actually hard write headers and footer.

People don't create books in PDF format. They create them in some other format, be it .tex, or Word .doc, or .rtf, or whatever InDesign uses, (or even .html), and then they create the PDF from it. The question of ease of editing has to do with the source it comes from: PDF just provides a *universal* output for all these kinds of sources. The point is, you shouldn't need to convert it to another format. If you wanted another format, you'd go back to the source.

The only way pdf can think of working is having multiple version with different font size and scren size, and the publishers will never bother themselves with that.

It's not hard to do (as explained above), and they will bother with it if it's demanded by the public, and of course, it'll be demanded by the public if pdf becomes a standard format on people's devices, especially one preferred to others.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I have no idea what TeX is. (Something in my brain says it's a Unix thing?)

It's a cross-platform type-setting system, available for Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, you name it, and it's entirely free and open-souce. Most people use it with the LaTeX macros:
The LaTeX Project
The Beauty of LaTeX
The TeX User Group
And for forums, there's some great Usenet groups and this forum:
The LaTeX Community

It typically outputs to DVI, PS or PDF formats, though there are output algorithms to HTML too, though they don't always work quite as well (in part because HTML doesn't support everything TeX does).

Is it something I could easily format my own ebooks for? Part of why I use PDFs is that I'm very comfortable formatting Word docs for conversion to PDF; I don't have any HTML-editing software that's nearly as easy to work with, so I don't format for ePub & mobi. (Or, possibly, I just haven't been trained on the software I have.)

There are WYSIWYG LaTeX editors, though most cost money. Many of us prefer to edit the code ourselves, which is straightforward. .tex documents are plain text format, and can be edited with something like Notepad if you wanted, though there are text editors designed to facilliate writing .tex documents like TeXnicCenter, TeXmaker, TeXshop and Kile that are also freely available and make it even easier. There's a bit of a learning curve at first, but the basic idea is simple enough.

If you can make sense, e.g., out of an HTML document's code, e.g.:

<html>
<head>
<title>This is the title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the title</h1>
<h2>This is the chapter name.</h2>
<h3>This is a section name.</h3>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.</p>
<p><i>This paragraph is in italics.</i></p>
<p>Here is an image: <img src="myimage.jpg" />.</p>
</body>
</html>

You can probably make sense of the corresponding LaTeX document:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{graphics}
\title{This is the title.}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\chapter{This is the chapter name.}
\section{This is a section name.}

This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

\textit{This paragraph is in italics.}

Here is an image: \includegraphics{myimage.jpg}
\end{document}

Do Word docs convert fluently to TeX docs, if the interpreting device has the right software?

There are conversion utilities out there which work all right for fairly simple documents. Once you get hooked on LaTeX, you'll forget all about the ugliness of Word, however. (I shudder to think of those dark days when I used Word...)

And like PDF, TeX is designed to produce pages which look good on a single size of page. It's popular in exactly the same fields where PDF is popular - academic and technical publications. It is not a deacent way of handling situations like...oh...ereaders where reflow is used.

Why not? Something has to do the rendering, and so long as we're talking an e-Ink screen, where you don't scroll, but view a page at a time, and switch displays a page at a time, the rendering is done in pages. Why not just upload .tex source, have the rendering engine on the machine itself--TeX is not that resource-intensive as all that--and then at a click of a button you can have it re-render it as if it had changed the page size options to the geometry package or font size options to the document class.

LaTeX does fine with pages the size of a standard e-Ink screen. Heck, using LaTeX, I made a version of the book I'm working on where the page sizes are the size of an iPhone screen: 50x75mm. It looks a little funny, but so does a ePub with the same size font on that screen. If anything, it looks better.