[ahi]

Let me politely point out:

Originally Posted by dmikov

The question of the thread is not Typography vs. plain text.

Indeed--and I do believe this post of yours is the first time such a comparison has been brought up.

Originally Posted by dmikov

What many people on this thread are trying to say is when typography overrules the major attraction of portable/mobile universal format, that can be read on any device (from iPhone to 24" computer screen), then we don't want it with it's limitations. And that's what a pdf is.

And, plainly, they are wrong. For books--unless you have redefined books in your mind as nary more than pulp fiction--PDF is the only format that has any chance of offering both quality typesetting for specially targetted devices and reflow to smaller than optimal/untargeted devices.

HTML, the markup language that ePub basically is (and what most other reflow formats also are, albeit in a more crippled way), is 18 years old and at least for the last 6-8 years better typography has been to varying extent a perceived priority among web developers... but anything borderline proper typography via HTML still remains elusive in the foreseeable future.

Your concern about tagged PDFs being large and processing heavy are so temporal that they are truly silly to have ever raised. Both processing power and storage space (in terms of tagged PDFs) will cease to be issues at all in as little as another year or two... if indeed they genuinely are issues today, of which I am not convinced.

Originally Posted by dmikov

So please abandon the posturing of an elite connosier and all insinuations, that people don't know what they want from books. That's just ridiculous.

No. Along with your car mechanic, your dentist, your banker, and your contractor I will continue to firmly hold to the notion that I know my areas of expertise better than some random person that thinks they know more than I on account of having looked at/handled/used the final product of my field of work.

This notion is only ridiculous if you are ignorant about bookmaking and assume it's the sort of thing that can be successfully taught in a two-day weekend course. If you actually have even just a superficial understanding of the depth and breadth of issues and considerations involved in producing a quality book, chances are you will neither consider yourself just as qualified as a professional nor will you illogically assume that it is a task that is machine- or software-automatable.

Originally Posted by dmikov

P.S There is no reason to invent straw man of death of bookmaking or abandoning decentrly formatted book. That's not what this thread is about and nobody but Ahi saying that. This thread is quite simple is about can an old aniquated pdf be a fit for a new media i.e e-book reading devices or not.

This thread is about people ignorantly ragging on the only professional eBook format that exists, because the publishers they buy eBooks from are yet to give a damn about eBook reading device owners and have yet to target either reflowable or non-reflowable professional quality PDFs at them.

And what I am saying, and will continue to state--what with it being the plain truth and all--is that no reflow format, particularly not one based on HTML, can do a good job with typography. Why? Because trying to do so hands part of the typographic work off to software... and typography is not a software-solvable problem.

The easiest to understand issue is hyphenation. If software cannot reliable and accurately hyphenate basically all words contained in a document, it has every chance of encountering situations where it may be able to make no typographically sound decision.

In English, ignoring the fact that there are well over a million words, which may be combined in impossible to foresee ways to produce, for all intents and purposes, infinitely more words... not to mention the possibility of foreign words being included in the text, proper names whether common or esoteric. If the software cannot figure out the correct hyphenation pattern for all the words in a given eBook, it cannot arbitrarily reflow and expect to be able to render something still professional-looking. (I suppose only reading eBooks about working class Americans, with common Christian names, going to well-known popular places, doing things everybody knows about/has done before is a good way to minimise software hyphenation problems.)

In other languages, you can easily get into a situation where a given word can mean two (or more) entirely different things and therefore also have differing correct hyphenation based on what they actually mean in the given context... context that may be difficult to impossible to determine via software due to the language's relatively free word order. Not that the idea that eBook reading software should have to know anything about the semantics of the text isn't ludicrous to begin with... because it truly is, and there are languages where without that, getting hyphenation right is literally hopeless. Unless of course you will have a human being spend more time manually pre-soft-hyphenating the entire document than it would take to typeset it to popular eBook reading device screen sizes as tagged PDFs (so they reflow to less popular eBook reading device sizes in the less than optimal way they cannot help but do).

If you have a solution--not involving technology magically saving the day in the future by as yet unexplainable means--to the hyphenation problem... perhaps I am wrong and you are right. If you do not... I would suggest it is a strong sign that you are not sufficiently aware of the issues to counter my statements insightfully.

But I said all of this before. I am absolutely certain even in this specific damn thread.

I'm off to go slumber in my magnificent Ivory Tower now!

- Ahi