Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
varmemester, you should direct your energy and disgust at Adobe. They designed PDF and they failed to update it to adequately work with smaller devices. The crap really doesn't even work well with larger monitors attached to computers. It was designed during the print and read it era of the early 1990s and is too antiquated to work well in the 2010s.
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the fault is much more with amazon that it is with adobe. there's plenty of reasons to hate on adobe and pdf, but looking bad on a 6" screen isn't one of them. the PDF format was designed so that a document would look the same on your screen as it did when you printed it. so what is on the third page is always on the third page, no matter how you view it.
reflow is the problem that PDF was designed to solve. when people mailed documents, they'd open with different fonts or margins or something depending on the word processor settings and the page layout would be different. people didn't like this, and started using PDF so that documents wouldn't change between platforms. it's not a flaw in PDF, it's just that PDF isn't suitable for ereaders. the fault lies squarely with people who unnecessarily package documents as PDFs.
when you reflow a PDF, you're basically throwing away all the PDF data and converting it to a text file. it would be nice if amazon could include this feature on the device instead of making us rely on programs like calibre to do it for us.