Thread: PDF is not an eBook format
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Old 09-09-2009, 10:50 AM   #566
ahi
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Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra View Post
Having played with LyX over the weekend all the way until today, I must revise my opinion of PDF as an ebook format. Here is my revised view:

Letter- or A4 sized PDFs, especially complex ones, tend to look like crap on the (smaller) reader screens. Specially-formatted PDFs look way better than anything else I have ever seen on the Sony, and are a faithful representation of the content as it was (intended to be) laid out.

This includes the pretty full justification, hyphenation (both fantastic features of LyX/LaTeX and I don't have any reason to complain about how it hyphenates, even in SF books with lots of made up words), fonts, TOC, graphics and whatnot.

The drawback is you lose some layout flexibility; press the zoom button and it all goes awry. Of course, formatting the PDF with a decent font + font size takes away the need to zoom to a great extent (though when my eyes are tired I like to do this). I don't see publishers putting out several PDFs of each books with different font sizes formatted for each size mainstream screen any time soon if ever, though.

So all in all, I am pretty happy with this rather combative thread; I have found LyX which takes some getting used to but once you have a decent profile/layout set up you can process books quickly and with minimal intervention (I am big on automation) and make them look great. I'd post some results here but most of my conversions go against the MR rules (copyright) and they would probably make the professional typographer's eyes bleed. Muahahahaaa!
Congrats!

Regarding the putting out of multiple PDFs for different font sizes and different screen sizes... I maintain that it sounds more onerous than it really is. Not to mention that as long as devices support proper resizing of PDFs, there can be useful sharing of sorts... e.g.: the 10pt & 6" screen version could be the 8" screen large print version.

Anyways though... good luck with your future PDF endeavours!

Edit: You could take screenshots and post those!

- Ahi
Last edited by ahi; 09-09-2009 at 10:54 AM.
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