Quote:
Originally Posted by Crexis
Why do people keep bringing up this purely theoretical argument.
Yes, strictly speaking, you're correct. However in everyday practice, a whole bunch of PDFs is what I have (not epub, not txt, not doc, PDF). And no author is even aware of the kind of screen or display it's intended to be read. That's just a technical detail, simply not part of their reality whatsoever.
Does an author working with a 26" monitor ever consider that people with a 15" laptop may want to read the PDF too? No. They're not even aware this is an issue. Does this happen in reality? Yes, of course, all the time.
No, I don't care about the way it is "supposed" to be viewed. (By the way, supposed by whom? Certainly not its author, they don't even know about this)
I want to read a PDF the best way possible, given the material I have: a Kobo Glo.
Converting them to ePub through an external tool usually does a good job (which clearly proves that a very workable acceptable solution exists), albeit a tedious, inconvenient process to do this for every PDF. I think it's extremely user unfriendly that the Kobo eReader doesn't have similar functionality built in.
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That's the point though; the author doesn't care what screen you have. They have laid out the PDF exactly the way they want it to be seen.
I'm not saying that a reflow feature wouldn't be appreciated, just making sure that people know that it's a hack, no two ways about it, and it would likely fail on many, many PDF documents with anything beyond basic formatting.
Yes, reflow could be a nice little feature. No, Kobo has not mislead anyone, they support the PDF standard just fine. Yes, PDFs are, in general, a horrible format for any text-heavy documents that don't rely on complex formatting.