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Old 02-05-2010, 01:35 PM   #8
wallcraft
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Posts: 6,977
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Mississippi, USA
Device: Kindle 3, Kobo Glo HD
Quote:
Originally Posted by pendragginp View Post
Could somebody tell me what 'reflow' is?
Most ebook formats reflow, i.e. if you change the font size the amount of text per line changes. Most web pages reflow this way (i.e. HTML is a reflowable format). PDF is a page layout format, designed to place text exactly where the publishers wanted it on the page. So on a large screen device, you usually pan and zoom a PDF page which magnifies the text but not where it is on the original page. Pannning and zooming works less well on a small screen, and works poorly on an EInk screen because the refresh time is relatively long.

Since most PDFs are text, it is possible to extract the text and reflow it like you would HTML. This does not always work, depending on the complexity of the original PDF layout. An Adobe PDF ebook should be designed to allow reflow, but not all are (and there and many PDFs from other sources).
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