[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by frabjous

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

Can. Don't.

They don't currently consistently put the right metadata in their documents, and you think they're likely to make multiple page sizes? (And how would that work with DRM--you buy *one* page size, and are stuck with it? Would publishers even pay to apply DRM to multiple page sizes?)

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.

Publishers don't provide the source document to convert from, in order to make a PDF ebook readable on a 3" screen.

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.

"The public" doesn't know that filetypes exist. The vast majority of them think that all ebooks are interchangeable, and that somewhere out there in webland is a program that converts files to "ebook format."

(You can blame Microsoft for most of this; they're the ones who turned off file extensions in the default view of Windows Explorer.)

The public will demand NOTHING; they expect books to appear in a fixed format. Those who find ebook PDFs unreadable will decide "eh, I guess I'm not into ebooks; I like paper," not "I'd read more of these if they were arranged better on the screen I use."

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

Thanks; will look into it. I'm nervous about learning another markup language, but it does seem useful.