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Originally Posted by Jellby
Isn't topaz roughly equivalent to PDF formatted for a small screen?
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Sorta... but not really.
Topaz has a dictionary of glyphs (SVG fonts) that represent characters, groups of characters, or sometimes whole words that are used in the book. XML is then used to assemble those SVG glyphs and any images the book may contain into "pages" that are reflowable. The original OCR scan is included but only used for text search purposes—which due to uncorrected scan errors, often produces interesting results.
I've always felt that Topaz had the ability to produce some beautifully rendered books, but many times were hastily thrown together and oftentimes the glyphs were "fuzzy." But when a topaz book was good... it was damn good.
Most of the hate for topaz comes from it's bloat—they're huge files (which probably contributed to sluggish page turns), the user's inability to be able to change the font (the SVG glyphs are hard-coded), and of course the largely unsatisfying results when trying to convert them to another format.