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Old 08-31-2009, 12:44 PM   #421
Elfwreck
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WillAdams View Post
jswolf said:
>One big downside for PDF....

>Because it is fixed it's not all that good for people who need to have a larger font size
>on screen. because once it's made, that's it, it's made.

And you're ignoring the possibility of a .pdf having tags and being reflowable, why?
Because reflowed PDFs are not as well-formatted as the average ePub. They lose their paragraph indents entirely, and the tagging has problems with short paragraphs (dialogue and poetry, mostly). Reflow also keeps the original page breaks, which leads to orphan lines.

And I've got several PDFs that, even with tagged reflow (and my willingness to read several lines of dialogue lumped together in a paragraph) have no comfortably-readable size; the M setting gets me text the same size as the original, only with no margins, and the L is too big for me to comfortably read.

Reflow is a tolerable workaround for PDFs that are unreadable on their own--letter-sized monstrosities; magazine articles in columns. Expecting it to work for well-designed PDFs is a cop-out; it says "I can't match what the reader needs, but they can pretend it's a badly-made ePub if they don't like the original version."
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