Quote:
Originally Posted by khalleron
Good Lord! How big would those files be? I'd like to have more than 2 or 3 books on my reader, thank you very much!
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They wouldn't be very big at all since the font only needs to be embedded (or better yet, subsetted) a single time. The rest is just the text portion, which is relatively small. And the text can also be compressed (an option that isn't utilized in PDFs a lot of the time).
PDFs can be a very wide range of things, but most people seem to focus on the most inefficient versions of those. For instance, storing scans of book pages is horribly inefficient (each page is an image). Whereas having the pages laid out as text descriptors takes up almost no more space than just the text itself (the difference really is including the subsetted font, which will generally be maybe 50-100KB). So while a scanned book of 300 pages could be 10MB, a properly distilled version of the same book could be 400KB, and actually be of higher quality since the type glyphs are still in their vector form. Meanwhile, a plaintext version of that same book (minus italics, bolds, headings, and other formatting) would weigh in at 225KB. At the same time, an ePub version with embedded fonts could come in at 500 or 600KB because it can't subset the fonts.