Best format..

[jamadams]

Hi all,

I've just bougth a PRS-600 after a bit of a break from the e-book scene. Previously I have owned a Librie and a PRS-505.

Anyway.. is LRF still the best format to use? I've heard about all this ePub stuff but didn't know how well it worked with the 600. How does your mileage vary with different formats?

[Amalthia]

I personally use LRF and RTF the most on my PRS-505. From what I'm reading epub/LRF/and RTF all work the same on the 600...

[Superlucky]

Epubs don't have full justification, so there's a ragged right edge that bothers some people. Also, the page numbering does not change like it does on an lrf when you change the font. In other words, you could be on page 6 for two or three page turns, but it's easier to get a feel for how large a book is. The page numbers are also on the right side of each "page", which some people dislike, but it doesn't seem noticeable to me and it doesn't interfere with the text (when the page numbers get over a thousand they show up lighter over any letters they clash with).

The Sony store is going to all epub at the end of the year and all the Google books available for the Sony are (poorly-formatted) epubs, and I'm banking on it to win the format wars, so you may want to think about longevity as well. The next generation of ebook devices may not support lrfs.

I would suggest that you download some free books in both formats and compare. I would make sure the books come from the same source here or at Feedbooks or Smashwords. Some of the different formats are uploaded by different users and are not of similar quality, so be careful.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by jamadams

Anyway.. is LRF still the best format to use? I've heard about all this ePub stuff but didn't know how well it worked with the 600. How does your mileage vary with different formats?

Re: "how well", the 600 can render epub just fine.

The "best" format depends on what your personal metrics are. What is important to you? Small size? Full justification? With proper hyphenation? Should it be scalable? Easy to edit? Easy to produce? Transferable to other devices?

Depending on how you answer these questions, the best format will be one of PDF (formatted for Sony screen), LRF, epub, RTF, images or even plain text.

Personally, I have a new-found fondness for custom-made PDFs using princeXML - I feel they are typographically superior to the other formats (justification, hyphenation, most faithful rendering of content) at the cost of some flexibility (zooming makes it look like crap) and portability (unless the device has a similar screen size). Other people make different choices.

[Loose_Appeal]

How do you format a PDF to fit a Sony Screen properly?

[Superlucky]

Originally Posted by Loose_Appeal

How do you format a PDF to fit a Sony Screen properly?

http://www.sonystyle.com/wcsstore/So..._createPDF.pdf

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Superlucky

Epubs don't have full justification, so there's a ragged right edge that bothers some people.

Just to clarify what Superlucky says, it's the current ePub implementation on the Sony which doesn't support full justification; the ePub standard certainly supports it, as does pretty much every other ePub-supporting device. If you display an ePub in the Sony eBook Library, you'll see that even that supports full justification.

[astra]

So far, LRF is the winner.

Got to wait until:
1) you have a decent tool to create good, custom made epub books without any coding knowledge

2) Sony Reader implements full justification in epub

[acidzebra]

I find the justification in epub and lrf both unsatisfactory; it just messes with the spacing between words. No hyphenation or kerning. But YMMV, as always.

[tovare]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

I find the justification in epub and lrf both unsatisfactory; it just messes with the spacing between words. No hyphenation or kerning. But YMMV, as always.

Quality hyphenation should be possible in the Epub standard at least, by inserting soft hyphens character: 0xAD or the entity * Not sure if it works on my sony reader.

The Apache project has an XML hypenhation engine based on the TeX-engine which has some quality hyphenhation pattern files for many languages. Since EPub is XML, I guess it should be possible to run it through such a tool prior to publishing.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by tovare

Quality hyphenation should be possible in the Epub standard at least, by inserting soft hyphens character: 0xAD or the entity * Not sure if it works on my sony reader. The Apache project has an XML hypenhation engine based on the TeX-engine which has some quality hyphenhation pattern files for many languages. Since EPub is XML, I guess it should be possible to run it through such a tool prior to publishing.

Yes, in the future all file formats and all protocols will be perfect, this is well-known

However, in the here and now, both the princeXML > PDF and LaTeX (and derivatives) > PDF routes offer pretty hyphenation, kerning, ligatures and full justification, epub does not (at least on the prs-505, I have no other readers to test on)

[ankit]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

Personally, I have a new-found fondness for custom-made PDFs using princeXML - I feel they are typographically superior to the other formats (justification, hyphenation, most faithful rendering of content) at the cost of some flexibility (zooming makes it look like crap) and portability (unless the device has a similar screen size). Other people make different choices.

Acidzebra,

I tried epub->pdf, and html->pdf using calibre. The output profile was set to the Sony reader. The resulting document looked fine on the computer, and the first ~10 pages on the reader also looked fine. But after around page 11 or so, all pages were completely blank on the reader. This is in the Small font size on the PRS-300.

Can you give a little more information about your princeXML -> PDF and latex->pdf pipeline that you mention? Is there a latex template you use? How do you convert form html/epub->pdf?

thanks!
ankit

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by ankit

I tried epub->pdf, and html->pdf using calibre. The output profile was set to the Sony reader. The resulting document looked fine on the computer, and the first ~10 pages on the reader also looked fine. But after around page 11 or so, all pages were completely blank on the reader. This is in the Small font size on the PRS-300.

I can't really comment on Calibre's PDF output, I don't use it.

Originally Posted by ankit

Can you give a little more information about your princeXML -> PDF and latex->pdf pipeline that you mention? Is there a latex template you use? How do you convert form html/epub->pdf?

Let's discuss princeXML rather than LaTeX because it is easier to use and my LaTeX skills are still embryonic. Just install the software, create a decent css template you want to use, and then run your HTML source documents through princeXML. That is all.

This discussion should be of interest to you, and in particular this post lists a css template you can use as a base. I also recommend getting an epub from FeedBooks and unzipping it using your favorite archive software, then look at the CSS folder. Speaking of FeedBooks, if you ask it to create a custom PDF from any of their books I believe it uses princeXML to generate the resulting PDF.

This all assumes HTML as input. Getting HTML out of epub is fairly simple; see (in the same conversation listed earlier) this epub2pdf tool for instance. If I don't have a HTML source to work with I usually convert other formats to epub using Calibre with debug settings on, then work on the generated (X)HTML files.

But it all starts with installing princeXML and toying around a little. The princeXML documentation is spartan but very complete.

[ankit]

acidzebra,

Thanks for the detailed post. I spent a few hours yesterday playing with princexml and the thread you pointed to. So far I am very impressed. Not only do the generated PDFs look better than anything else on the reader, it also satisfies the tinkerer in me. Now I am getting more and more interested in typesetting and fonts in general - this is getting addictive!

ankit

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by ankit

acidzebra,

Thanks for the detailed post. I spent a few hours yesterday playing with princexml and the thread you pointed to. So far I am very impressed. Not only do the generated PDFs look better than anything else on the reader, it also satisfies the tinkerer in me. Now I am getting more and more interested in typesetting and fonts in general - this is getting addictive!

ankit

Oh dear, another one for the dark side. Saints preserve me

Nah, you are right, it is pretty awesome. And many parts can be automated - more fodder for the tinkerer! But the biggest bonus to me is that I don't have to learn yet another markup(like) language, I can stay with and expand on CSS. Next you'll be wanting to grab some extra fonts, like these excellent free ones or these ones. Once you have a template you like you can stamp out tons of great-looking books with minimum effort.