PDF is not an eBook format

[thibaulthalpern]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

Of course
For example, there are plenty of fonts that are absolutely gorgeous when printed at 1200DPI but are unreadable on my ~180DPI Sony PRS-700 -- even when the physical measurements of the characters are identical! And your beautifully hand-tuned layout for an 8.5"x11" page (or A4 page!) won't work well on my 6"-diagonal reader.

This is not unusual. People think font typefaces are useable at all kinds of different sizes and that's not true. Professional typographers will tell you that certain font typefaces are designed to be viewed at certain sizes. When the size goes beyond or below the original design, that font typeface will need to be slightly adjusted (usually manually) to make it optimised. In fact, this is still a problem despite font technologies like TrueType that allow fonts to scale. Automatic scaling doesn't entirely work.

But at this point of the conversation, we're not talking about PDF or any other digital book format but rather the problem of typeface. I just want to make that clear.

[LDBoblo]

I'm a PDF supporter, not because I really love PDF (I don't), but because currently it's the only format that comes close to convincing me that I'm actually reading a book, which is the culmination of a number of different arts being brought together in a literary presentation, rather than flat content in a glorified text file on a glorified calculator.

True true, the small formats currently still suck for full size PDFs. With the small screen sizes, you just don't have the real estate to use large documents efficiently. A4 printed gives you quite a bit of space that you just don't have on ebook reader devices now. How does one resolve that? You could...
a) demand an offering for a large format and small format document, one that would much more cleanly display, with requisite compromises made in initial design to allow for legibility. Extra time, money, hassle, and not enough solidarity among end-users to be a trustworthy methodology.

b) demand technology improvements that allow for more seamless global-local navigation. Currently, navigation systems in ebook readers is pathetic. Zoom is insanely slow, panning is awful, screen resolution and contrast make the reading experience pretty wretched. When capacitive multi-touch screens hit the press, I was just imagining how all that fingerwork on a good touch screen with some OK hardware behind it could really make moving around large media on a small display...well...less unpleasant. It would be far from ideal from linear text as in novels, but then again, the current restrictions of the technology don't really allow for quality books anyway.

I'd currently rather gouge my eyes out than read magazines on my ebook reader. My computer handles them well enough, but I have a 24" display, very easy and convenient and instant zooming and panning for getting in close to the details.

If I'm going to pay for an ebook or for a magazine, I want some kind of presentation work involved. I want to be looking at a product of visual creation, not merely a transcription of someone's thoughts and imagination. I'm sure that satisfies a lot of people, but it's not good enough for me.

PDFs are far from perfect, and their rigidity puts them at odds with pocket and handheld devices. If ebook reader devices weren't quite as lame with regard to maneuvering about in documents, some of the problem would be ameliorated. However, that's really just not the case.

Format unification is all fine and well, but people are trying to choose the lesser among evils of the current formats...most of which seem to be patchwork jobs that only fulfill the most primitive of needs and cannot perform anything especially well. The market is fragmented and polarized and hostile to properly unified formats or unified content access.

For now though, if I want to view something that at least gives me *some* feeling of visual quality and complete presentation, I am bound to PDF. Everything else is a word processor document, and I don't want to pay for that unless I can reformat it myself (which, of course, most formats are not too keen about with their licensing being what it is).

[cmdahler]

I agree completely with LDBoblo. Typesetting is a centuries-old art form that has evolved some very complicated and detailed rules for producing the most pleasing and readable print on a page. PDF is the only format that can be used to faithfully reproduce the pleasing quality of a professionally typeset page. All other e-reader formats take these time-honored and centuries-proven techniques for producing quality text and simply toss them out the window, producing ugly word and letter spacing, ragged margins, and just in general displaying basic text on a computer screen.

When I bought my Sony, it was with an aim to replace my printed library with a single reading source, but I in no way wanted to sacrifice the quality of the typeset page. I've experimented with LRF and EPUB, and there's just no way those formats are up to anything even remotely approaching typeset-quality print.

Ultimately, the final solution to this problem with ereaders is for someone to incorporate TeX as a core display engine. The text of the book would exist on the reader as a basic TeX file with emphasis markings and any other special typesetting instructions, and when the user selects that book to read, the TeX engine generates typeset text on the fly. If you want to zoom, TeX simply regenerates the typeset with a larger font size, thus preserving all of the professional quality typesetting TeX is known for while producing a larger output.

Until someone manages to do this (which actually wouldn't be difficult at all - the source for TeX could even be modified and recompiled to handle DRM), PDF is the only way to go if you want genuinely pleasing typeset text on the reader. I can't even imagine reading something like War and Peace or The Count of Monte Cristo as epub. Yuck.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

... PDF is the only format that can be used to faithfully reproduce the pleasing quality of a professionally typeset page. ....

So young (very first post) and yet, so much wisdom....

Spot on.

[Syniurge]

I'm requesting an IP check on cmdahler.

PDF battalions rising by almost 50% at once is suspicious

[Syniurge]

OK, forget everything I've said

I just learned from the first page of the topic that PDF can contain tags. I've been learning PDF stuff through the Poppler code, which is used in Calibre for PDF conversion and doesn't make use of tags at all. That's probably why Mobipocket Creator is so much better at PDF conversion to Mobi for PDF files that are properly filled with tags.

http://www.planetpdf.com/enterprise/...ContentID=6067

[Syniurge]

(to be removed)

[Lemurion]

It's simple: PDFs optimized for a given device are the best-looking and most usable format out there. PDFs optimized for a different device and screen size are the least usable and worst-looking format out there. They're generally either perfect or worthless with no middle ground. That's one reason so many people don't like PDFs - as the old Klingon (SFB version) Proverb says "Perfect is the enemy of good enough."

For many the difference between a good PDF and a reflowable format is not as great as that between an unsuitable PDF and a reflowable format. It's a matter of priorities: which is more important? Having the very best, or not having the very worst?

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Syniurge

I'm requesting an IP check on cmdahler.

PDF battalions rising by almost 50% at once is suspicious

Interesting to suspect trolling at the merest hint of agreement on such a matter. You should get used to it; as hype for these things continues to spread and prices [very] gradually come down, you're gonna get some hardcore bookworms buying these devices sight unseen. Many of those people are going to be disappointed in the state of affairs with regard to ebook design.

In other words, the folks who appreciate typography and other characteristics of paper books are going to be late adopters in general, and those people will be more vocal in their dissatisfaction.

[PhishStyx]

Hm, but I have the best. My PDF's and my DR 1000s work together excellently to provide me with a very high quality reading experience, regardless of Mr. Boblo's opinion of e-ink readers.

[EowynCarter]

Let's use each format for what it's good at.
Pdf as a source for paper print, ePub Mobi and other for e-books.

Yeah, pdf is good for all the typo stuff, but then, who care ? What i want is my e-book to be readable. And the small text in pdf in no go for that.

Now if only ade could support hyphenation as well as the modi reader does... ePub or mobi or whatever could get nice formating if properly used. Just like a pdf can be badly formated if badly used.

As to having different pdf for different screen size, the publisher won't bother proofreading even one e-book...

[Tuna]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

It's simple: PDFs optimized for a given device are the best-looking and most usable format out there. PDFs optimized for a different device and screen size are the least usable and worst-looking format out there. They're generally either perfect or worthless with no middle ground. That's one reason so many people don't like PDFs - as the old Klingon (SFB version) Proverb says "Perfect is the enemy of good enough."

For many the difference between a good PDF and a reflowable format is not as great as that between an unsuitable PDF and a reflowable format. It's a matter of priorities: which is more important? Having the very best, or not having the very worst?

This is the truth - PDFs break badly on the wrong screen size. Expecting all ebooks to converge on a single (large) screen size to solve the problem is naieve.

LDBoblo's dedication to beautiful presentation is commendable, but it sounds to me that he reads more magazines than paperbacks. In the former (or with technical manuals) layout is far, far more important than the latter. That's not to diminish the importance of good typesetting in traditional books, but the 'good enough' of reflowable formats can get close enough to best practice that only the most pedantic readers will notice the difference. Reflow engines are still improving, but the state of the art is getting pretty good.

In any of these discussions it seems important to make some distinction between the different uses for ebooks. Leisure reading, english literature, foreign language, big fonts for poor vision, technical manuals, office documents, academic text, web feeds and annotations all present different issues and cannot, will not be solved by a single technology, however good it might be.

But really, PDF is not a good format for ebooks.

[pdurrant]

No need to use TeX for input. What is needed is for the layout engines for the ebooks readers to be improved to do proper paragraph and page level optimisations, including justification, hyphenation and widow/orphan control.

It wasn't possible on Palm PDAs because of processing limits, it certainly should be possible on recent dedicated ebook readers and software, it just hasn't been done.

Originally Posted by cmdahler

Ultimately, the final solution to this problem with ereaders is for someone to incorporate TeX as a core display engine. The text of the book would exist on the reader as a basic TeX file with emphasis markings and any other special typesetting instructions, and when the user selects that book to read, the TeX engine generates typeset text on the fly. If you want to zoom, TeX simply regenerates the typeset with a larger font size, thus preserving all of the professional quality typesetting TeX is known for while producing a larger output.

[EowynCarter]

No need to use TeX for input. What is needed is for the layout engines for the ebooks readers to be improved to do proper paragraph and page level optimisations, including justification, hyphenation and widow/orphan control.

Exactly

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

No need to use TeX for input. What is needed is for the layout engines for the ebooks readers to be improved to do proper paragraph and page level optimisations, including justification, hyphenation and widow/orphan control.

ADE already does fairly decent widow/orphan control. It won't allow single lines of a paragraph to stand alone at the end of a page or at the beginning of a page. The result of this is that you may end up with 2 blank lines at the end of a page (since the bumped paragraph would consist of 3 lines). Something they could do is modulate the leading a tiny bit to spread everything out to make those 2 missing lines less noticeable.

However, what's really needed is a decent hyphenation engine. Justification is fairly easy to implement, and good justification is entirely dependent on good hyphenation.

And aren't the processors in most readers about the same as what you'd find in a PDA?