PDF is not an eBook format

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Yeap.
And that's the problem. You're all saying ePub is crap. Not true. Adobe's implementation of epUB is.

Depends on what the end consumer will accept. For people like me who want their readers to display text in the typeset quality of the printed page, ePub is crap and will always be crap. I couldn't reflow the books I used to read on paper, and I have no interest in doing so on my reader. Reading the latest pulp garbage by Steele or today's edition of the Times might be fine with ePub; reading a literary masterpiece such as War and Peace or Monte Cristo is an art on an entirely different level. ePub will never be a suitable format for such masterworks; that's like asking one to appreciate a Monet on a 4x6 digital frame from Walmart. If I want to read such a book in a different font size, I'll just use TeX or Indesign to resize the font and re-export the PDF.

ePub might eventually get to where it can do decent hyphenation and paragraph-level formatting. Even TeX and Indesign can't do chapter-level formatting. Right now, good typesetting still requires some manual tweaking to prevent widows and orphans while keeping a consistent baseline and avoiding a ragged page bottom. Eventually, typesetting software may get sophisticated enough to produce a final product with no manual intervention at all, but until that time comes, those of us who do want a high-quality crafted display on our readers have no option but to use a PDF that was specifically designed for a particular font size and the screen size of our readers.

If this were not something I cared about, after all, I could just as easily have stayed with reading my books on my iPhone. I wanted a better reading experience than that.

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

reading a literary masterpiece such as War and Peace or Monte Cristo is an art on an entirely different level.

I've read it as ASCII text and I think it is the same story. Not sure though.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by 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.

Well if those were good formats. ePub is OK, but frankly, the mobi format I personally consider unusable because of its limitations.

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.

The file format has nothing to do with the size of the text.

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

Once again, the publishers won't proofread one e-book. So asking them to proffed that many version would be suicide.

They don't have to proofread each one separately -- they'll still be using the same source document for each of the sizes. All they need to do is use templates with the right settings, and all should go well. Sure, they should quickly visibly inspect each page of the output to make sure nothing unexpected happened, but it's still doable.

I'm self-re-publishing a public domain book as an e-book in my spare time, something a number of MR members do, and I've created it in 10 different formats, including 6 differently sized PDFs. All six are based on the same source; I don't need to proofread them separately. The amount of work involving in adding a size is negligible once you've got the first one proofread. It's a trivial matter of changing some settings, which takes seconds, and recompiling the source. It is worth paging through the output to make sure the new page size didn't do anything unexpected, but it's not as if doing this is going to introduce new typos or grammatical errors.

In any case, if I can do this in my free time by myself for no money at all, publishers can do it.

ePub can use images, different fonts, tables. Html and css allows for almost anything.

It's not really that there's anything wrong with html itself as a source code; it's just that there are no existing rendering engines that can do as well as TeX does with .tex source code. As source does, TeX and HTML are barely distinguishable, although TeX does have a lot more options for mathematics and technical fields than HTML does. HTML, e.g., with MathML does could be expanded to include it. Fine. It's still reinventing the wheel, as noted above, when we have an excellent rendering engine for TeX source already.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

You're trying to fix the old, rather than improve the new.
ePub is not perfect, far from it, but it have advantage pdf will never have (openness and ease of editing). And it can still be improved.
And an other thing, when doing a mobi -> ePub conversion, it works fine. With pdf, it get a mess because pdf actually hard write headers and footer.

People don't create books in PDF format. They create them in some other format, be it .tex, or Word .doc, or .rtf, or whatever InDesign uses, (or even .html), and then they create the PDF from it. The question of ease of editing has to do with the source it comes from: PDF just provides a *universal* output for all these kinds of sources. The point is, you shouldn't need to convert it to another format. If you wanted another format, you'd go back to the source.

The only way pdf can think of working is having multiple version with different font size and scren size, and the publishers will never bother themselves with that.

It's not hard to do (as explained above), and they will bother with it if it's demanded by the public, and of course, it'll be demanded by the public if pdf becomes a standard format on people's devices, especially one preferred to others.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I have no idea what TeX is. (Something in my brain says it's a Unix thing?)

It's a cross-platform type-setting system, available for Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, you name it, and it's entirely free and open-souce. Most people use it with the LaTeX macros:
The LaTeX Project
The Beauty of LaTeX
The TeX User Group
And for forums, there's some great Usenet groups and this forum:
The LaTeX Community

It typically outputs to DVI, PS or PDF formats, though there are output algorithms to HTML too, though they don't always work quite as well (in part because HTML doesn't support everything TeX does).

Is it something I could easily format my own ebooks for? Part of why I use PDFs is that I'm very comfortable formatting Word docs for conversion to PDF; I don't have any HTML-editing software that's nearly as easy to work with, so I don't format for ePub & mobi. (Or, possibly, I just haven't been trained on the software I have.)

There are WYSIWYG LaTeX editors, though most cost money. Many of us prefer to edit the code ourselves, which is straightforward. .tex documents are plain text format, and can be edited with something like Notepad if you wanted, though there are text editors designed to facilliate writing .tex documents like TeXnicCenter, TeXmaker, TeXshop and Kile that are also freely available and make it even easier. There's a bit of a learning curve at first, but the basic idea is simple enough.

If you can make sense, e.g., out of an HTML document's code, e.g.:

<html>
<head>
<title>This is the title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the title</h1>
<h2>This is the chapter name.</h2>
<h3>This is a section name.</h3>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.</p>
<p><i>This paragraph is in italics.</i></p>
<p>Here is an image: <img src="myimage.jpg" />.</p>
</body>
</html>

You can probably make sense of the corresponding LaTeX document:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{graphics}
\title{This is the title.}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\chapter{This is the chapter name.}
\section{This is a section name.}

This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

\textit{This paragraph is in italics.}

Here is an image: \includegraphics{myimage.jpg}
\end{document}

Do Word docs convert fluently to TeX docs, if the interpreting device has the right software?

There are conversion utilities out there which work all right for fairly simple documents. Once you get hooked on LaTeX, you'll forget all about the ugliness of Word, however. (I shudder to think of those dark days when I used Word...)

And like PDF, TeX is designed to produce pages which look good on a single size of page. It's popular in exactly the same fields where PDF is popular - academic and technical publications. It is not a deacent way of handling situations like...oh...ereaders where reflow is used.

Why not? Something has to do the rendering, and so long as we're talking an e-Ink screen, where you don't scroll, but view a page at a time, and switch displays a page at a time, the rendering is done in pages. Why not just upload .tex source, have the rendering engine on the machine itself--TeX is not that resource-intensive as all that--and then at a click of a button you can have it re-render it as if it had changed the page size options to the geometry package or font size options to the document class.

LaTeX does fine with pages the size of a standard e-Ink screen. Heck, using LaTeX, I made a version of the book I'm working on where the page sizes are the size of an iPhone screen: 50x75mm. It looks a little funny, but so does a ePub with the same size font on that screen. If anything, it looks better.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

I've read it as ASCII text and I think it is the same story. Not sure though.

Some make the same claim about using a paper bag.....

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Why not? Something has to do the rendering, and so long as we're talking an e-Ink screen, where you don't scroll, but view a page at a time, and switch displays a page at a time, the rendering is done in pages. Why not just upload .tex source, have the rendering engine on the machine itself--TeX is not that resource-intensive as all that--and then at a click of a button you can have it re-render it as if it had changed the page size options to the geometry package or font size options to the document class.

Really? Why bother with yet another format when you can pre-render everything, pack a bunch of .png files properly fitted for screen resolution and levels of gray? Complete "perfection" and total lock-in of the content.

There you go.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by Ankh

Really? Why bother with yet another format when you can pre-render everything, pack a bunch of .png files properly fitted for screen resolution and levels of gray? Complete "perfection" and total lock-in of the content.

There you go.

I don't have an objection to that. I'm fine with PDF, so long as people are encouraged to make them in multiple sizes.

I just didn't see what the objection was to doing it the other way. Calling it "yet another format" isn't quite fair. All the other formats out there can easily be converted to .tex.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by frabjous

I just didn't see what the objection was to doing it the other way. Calling it "yet another format" isn't quite fair.

Not fair?

Both PDF and collection of PNG's lock the content in. And PNG is superior to both PDF and TeX, as you have a pixel level control over the display.

Size of the publication is not an issue, so why bother with PDF and TeX formats, if the intent is to gain total control over the target screen?

PNG is already part of ePub rendering engine, TeX isn't. Yet another format, with all due respect.

[frabjous]

I misunderstood what you had in mind. PNGs for every page? That would result in a huge file size, comparatively. And you'd have the same problem as with PDFs that you couldn't reflow. Plus, you'd lose dictionary support and searchability -- or at least greatly complicate these things.

Why do you say that the size of the publication is not an issue?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by frabjous

In any case, if I can do this in my free time by myself for no money at all, publishers can do it.

Can. Don't.

They don't currently consistently put the right metadata in their documents, and you think they're likely to make multiple page sizes? (And how would that work with DRM--you buy *one* page size, and are stuck with it? Would publishers even pay to apply DRM to multiple page sizes?)

PDF just provides a *universal* output for all these kinds of sources. The point is, you shouldn't need to convert it to another format. If you wanted another format, you'd go back to the source.

Publishers don't provide the source document to convert from, in order to make a PDF ebook readable on a 3" screen.

It's not hard to do (as explained above), and they will bother with it if it's demanded by the public, and of course, it'll be demanded by the public if pdf becomes a standard format on people's devices, especially one preferred to others.

"The public" doesn't know that filetypes exist. The vast majority of them think that all ebooks are interchangeable, and that somewhere out there in webland is a program that converts files to "ebook format."

(You can blame Microsoft for most of this; they're the ones who turned off file extensions in the default view of Windows Explorer.)

The public will demand NOTHING; they expect books to appear in a fixed format. Those who find ebook PDFs unreadable will decide "eh, I guess I'm not into ebooks; I like paper," not "I'd read more of these if they were arranged better on the screen I use."

It's a cross-platform type-setting system, available for Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, you name it, and it's entirely free and open-souce. Most people use it with the LaTeX macros:
The LaTeX Project
The Beauty of LaTeX
The TeX User Group
And for forums, there's some great Usenet groups and this forum:
The LaTeX Community

Thanks; will look into it. I'm nervous about learning another markup language, but it does seem useful.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Why not? Something has to do the rendering, and so long as we're talking an e-Ink screen, where you don't scroll, but view a page at a time, and switch displays a page at a time, the rendering is done in pages. Why not just upload .tex source, have the rendering engine on the machine itself--TeX is not that resource-intensive as all that

It's still an order of magnitude more intensive than, for example, the ePub rendering engine Abobe use, however. It's not optimised for low-power devices, as a format. (And yes, that's important...even ePub is more expensive to render than LRX's)

More, again, it has little to do with ebooks. As you yourself note, it output's PDF's, and solves precisely the same problems PDF's do, and PDF's are a format for books, not for reading. Using a PDF and not having to expensively render the page layout as well as the text itself in the first place by using a PDF makes a lot more sense, if you demand fixed page layouts.

If I can't change the font size and have the page reflow on the fly, quickly; I don't want to mess arround with it, spending an hour+ easily per-book when perfect formatting isn't that important to me.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Can. Don't.

They don't currently consistently put the right metadata in their documents, and you think they're likely to make multiple page sizes? (And how would that work with DRM--you buy *one* page size, and are stuck with it? Would publishers even pay to apply DRM to multiple page sizes?)

Publishers don't provide the source document to convert from, in order to make a PDF ebook readable on a 3" screen.

That would be the advantage of selling the .tex source and having the reader process it; Of course, the DRM issue still stands, and the very idea of a DRMed .tex document makes my skin crawl... but still...

"The public" doesn't know that filetypes exist. The vast majority of them think that all ebooks are interchangeable, and that somewhere out there in webland is a program that converts files to "ebook format."

Stop. You are depressing me. You're probably right, but at least now while the technology is new, a disproportionate number of technophiles are using ebooks; all the more reasons we put the pressure on now.

(You can blame Microsoft for most of this; they're the ones who turned off file extensions in the default view of Windows Explorer.)

Of course, it wouldn't be so bad if they just set the default view to "Detail view" so that something relevant shows under "File type", but noo....

The public will demand NOTHING; they expect books to appear in a fixed format. Those who find ebook PDFs unreadable will decide "eh, I guess I'm not into ebooks; I like paper," not "I'd read more of these if they were arranged better on the screen I use."

You're depressing me again... But I don't think it's quite that bad. I imagine most people who have a reader will know about the zoom function; and if ebook sellers sold different sizes, they'd have to have them clearly marked.

Thanks; will look into it. I'm nervous about learning another markup language, but it does seem useful.

Depends on your needs I guess. It's very handy for my work, but I wouldn't use it to write a letter to Grandma.

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

More, again, it has little to do with ebooks. As you yourself note, it output's PDF's, and solves precisely the same problems PDF's do, and PDF's are a format for books, not for reading. Using a PDF and not having to expensively render the page layout as well as the text itself in the first place by using a PDF makes a lot more sense, if you demand fixed page layouts.

It doesn't have to be expensive in terms of processor overhead. Epub and TeX are essentially the same type of engine: plain marked-up text is provided to a rendering engine. When you open an EPub document in your reader for the first time, it takes a few seconds to as much as a minute, depending on how complex the document is. That's because the EPub engine is taking the plain text in the EPub file and typesetting it according to the mark-ups. It then saves this result so the next time you open the document, it is much quicker to open. Ever notice that the first time you hit the zoom button, at least on the Sony, it takes a few seconds before you get the zoomed text? That's because the engine is re-typsetting the new document. The next time you move to that zoom level, it takes much less time.

For pure text rendering, EPub is no different from a hypothetical device that would have TeX as its rendering engine. The main differences lie in the limitations and capabilities of each engine. TeX is light-years ahead of EPub because it's been around so much longer. EPub could eventually get to that level of professional typesetting, but who wants to wait 20 years for EPub to evolve to that stage when there's a perfectly good, open-source, free alternative right now? Sometimes big corporations just astound me in the levels of sheer stupidity they manage on a daily basis.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by frabjous

That would be the advantage of selling the .tex source and having the reader process it; Of course, the DRM issue still stands, and the very idea of a DRMed .tex document makes my skin crawl... but still...

A .tex source file can no more generate a typographically optimal document for an arbitrary size than an HTML file can (orphans, widows, words needing hyphenation will crop up at different places for different size screens... issues that are not machine-solvable). Admittedly a .tex source file would still produce better quality output than any ePub, LRF, LIT, Mobi, or any other reflow format ever known to man... so perhaps that would be a tolerable compromise between the "masses" demanding kindergarten-formatting and those who demand nothing less than what paper books can and usually do deliver.

This is a very dead horse though, friend... and I suspect an evil or possibly cursed one.

If you are in the habit of making your own eBooks via LaTeX/XeTeX, do drop me a private message.

- Ahi

[DawnFalcon]

TeX is massively more complex than ePuB, and includes an awful lot of things which an e-reader generally does not to worry about, but it would have to handle in a TeX render, adding to the rendering cost. TeX also has an awful lot of quirks suited to its target markets, which simply don't apply to ebooks.

A specalised subset of TeX might be appropriate, but not TeX itself. And I don't see anyone trying to build that subset. Also, you should be aware of the ambiguous wording problem of the TeX liscence, which won't pass many big companies legal departments.

Trying to apply old print soloutions to ebooks produces a variety of issues, and it's far better that for-ebook format formats be used, and improved. It won't take twenty years to get for ebooks to reasonable quality standards, unless people insist that pbook standards are used litterally for them.

ahi - yep, you keep pushing fixed-sized pages which I'll pay maybe a third of a nice, reflowing format for. Because that's all they're worth to me.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by ahi

A .tex source file can no more generate a typographically optimal document for an arbitrary size than an HTML file can (orphans, widows, words needing hyphenation will crop up at different places for different size screens... issues that are not machine-solvable).

LaTeX had its own hypenation rules, and you can embed custom hyphenation rules for non-standard words in the document itself. I don't see that as an issue at all. In fact, I think it does a better job than most humans would.

LaTeX also has thousands of widow and orphan control settings.

Perhaps what you're pointing out is that you'd want it to work differently on different sized screens. I noticed this when I was creating different sized PDFs for what I was working on: using the same orphan control rules for an i-phone sized page as for a A4 sized page is ridiculous. But all of that can be properly coded into a LaTeX package that scales the badness or orphans and widows accordingly.

Claiming that this isn't "machine solvable" just seems false... unless you're claiming that the rules typographers use when making this hand-corrections can't even be made into an algorithm in principle... and I can think of no evidence for such a claim.

Some people may disagree, but I don't think there need to be infinitely many sizes. 4 or 5 sizes seems like enough for eBooks. A little investigation will reveal what the best rules for each size is, and templates made for each, streamlining things for future production.

This is a very dead horse though, friend... and I suspect an evil or possibly cursed one.

Yes, you're probably right.

If you are in the habit of making your own eBooks via LaTeX/XeTeX, do drop me a private message.

Well, I've got one up here, and I'm working on more.

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

TeX is massively more complex than ePuB,

Comparing apples and oranges. An ePub file is not more complex than a TeX file. If anything, a TeX file is simpler. If you mean the rendering engine, you need to compare TeX to the HTML-interpreting rendering engines used to display web content. It's true that TeX is huge if you include ALL of the community-made content, as you noted, devoted to particular disciplines. You wouldn't load all of that on to your reader. For specialized things you'd just embed it along with the TeX source as needed, much like you embed images etc., along with the HTML inside an ePub. The core engine is no larger than your average web browser is, and works more efficiently, given that TeX was written by one of the foremost experts in algorithm theory in the country.

The "specialized subset" already exists: it's just the core LaTeX engine -- I suppose you'd need to add in the most often used packages, like graphics and the AMS math packages, and geometry for setting the screen size properly.

I don't sure about the ambiguity in the TeX license, but it's treated as fully open source by most of the open source community, and I sure as heck don't imagine Donald Knuth is going to sue anyone over anything.

But if you think it's just as easy to advance the HTML rendering engines for ePubs, and think this can be done in a reasonable span of time, with the same quality you already find with TeX--Great! But I'm not holding my breath.