Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael J Hunt
I'm an ignoramus about e-book readers as I don't own one. But I do have three e-books 'out there' and I'm curious to know how they appear on (or in) an e-reader. When I look at the pdf versions on my computer screen there's absolutely nothing about them that is different to their paper counterparts. Am I being naive, but aren't all books published in both forms identical? Could this only be true for books that are published with the intention of their appearing in both forms? Also, is it possible for unwanted errors to creep in during conversion from one format to another? If this is so, surely the publisher should subject the final pdf version to a proof-read before he sells it.
MJ
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PDFs are basically the only ebook format that is faithful to content layout as it was created. Most of the portable ebook reader devices though are a bit clumsy at best with PDFs unless specially laid out for the screen, and many users prefer formats that allow dynamic resizing of the text. The main contestant in this arena is ePUB, but it and most of its competitors are pretty much just HTML. Now if you can imagine what some websites looked like in different web browsers some years back (it still happens today, though to a much smaller extent), you can probably imagine how ePUB support looks.
With most such files, hyphenation is lost, and in some more deprecated readers like the Sony PRS-505, there isn't even full-width justification. For defaults in a few readers, italics, small caps, and bolds are simulated and not real, and when I tried a Kindle, all the books were crammed into the same typeface (though ePUB allows font embedding, like PDF does, but the Kindle doesn't support ePUB if I recall correctly). Basic details of formatting are handled in CSS like web pages, while more subtle things like kerning, ligatures, and H&J, and things dependent on pagination (orphan/widow control in particular), would probably need to be part of a viewing program. Current viewing programs are pretty much still in the dark ages though.