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Old 06-13-2007, 08:48 AM   #47
JSWolf
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hadrien View Post
Don't expect a "one format to rule them all" any time soon.
There's 2 reasons for this:
- reflowable formats and fixed version are both needed for the moment. As long as reflowable formats won't provide hyphenation and more advanced typesetting, PDF and similar formats will be the alternative.
- DRM: both publishers and hardware manufacturers will use DRM. Right now, Mobipocket and LRF are already in competition for this market.

The first problem could be fixed if all e-ink readers adopted much more advanced software for rendering reflowable formats. But for hyphenation, you need a dictionnary, so the problem isn't necessarily that simple: for each book, you need to know it's language. I'm not sure that the metadata of every reflowable format contain this information.
I have used Wordperfect. What Wordperfect did was put in non-displayable hyphens that were used to hyphenate words. So if these ebook formats supported that then the hyphens could be put in at the time f the book creation and the software creating the books can handle that and not the reader. Also, it would allow us to put in hyphens as needed as well.

Given all the various reflowable ebook formats today, which one(s) do you feel are the best ones (ignoring the DRM issue)?
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