PDF is not an eBook format

[pking36330]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Pdf is meant to have FIXED content on one page. That why you like pdf so much. Reflow goes against everything pdf is meant for, ...

How can you say 'reflow' goes against everything PDF stands for when the format author/owner built 'reflow' into PDF. PDF is capable of both 'fixed' and 'reflow' output formats. It is a very capable format when performing either, truly an adept schizo format. My grief is that looking at a file you can't tell if it is 'fixed' or 'reflow' or DRM or non-DRM, they all have to same suffix: ".pdf". So instead of looking at a file and immediately grasping its format capabilities (and limitations), I'm forced to open it to discover them.

[EowynCarter]

How can you say 'reflow' goes against everything PDF stands for when the format author/owner built 'reflow' into PDF.

That's a move from adobe to try and impose pdf for something it wasn't meant to do.

And why do you think adobe worked on ePub ? Because even them realised that pdf wasn't fit for e-book devices.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Pdf is meant to have FIXED content on one page. That why you like pdf so much. Reflow goes against everything pdf is meant for, as such, i'm not sure it would really work all right.

And yet I'm given to understand by reports from other mobileread members that it does. Unless you have experience/reports otherwise... your musing is no evidence to the contrary.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

And my opus IS a device worth reading on. E-book are not paper books. What is the best solution for p-book is not necessarily for e-books. They are different format with differents possibilities.

This is handwaving.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

E-books can have advantage paper book don't have (changing font size according to your liking), why not use it ?

Nobody said not to. But there's no need for the advantages to come at a crippling expense.

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

And why do you think adobe worked on ePub ? Because even them realised that pdf wasn't fit for e-book devices.

I'd guess it was rather to co-opt the ePub fanboys into a format they can like... Adobe Digital Editions... so that when the switch is made to PDF in the future, it will hurt them less.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by ahammer

shocked this has gone on for 25 pages...

Me too... but primarily because of the consistently lacking quality of the discourse.

Originally Posted by ahammer

in the long right pdf maybe better but the time line maybe 20 to 30 years before that format would be better.

Except, when done right, it is better... far better today. And if I'm going to have to fiddle with eBooks to get them right, my efforts may as well go into producing a professional PDF instead of a necessarily simpler HTML document.

- Ahi

[EowynCarter]

.
And yet I'm given to understand by reports from other mobileread members that it does. Unless you have experience/reports otherwise... your musing is no evidence to the contrary.

It seams that pdf need to be tagged for reflow right ? What if the pdf you want to read isn't tagged or badly tagged ?

While i agree e-book needs better formating, pdf is NOT a solution.

E-books can have advantage paper book don't have (changing font size according to your liking), why not use it ?
Nobody said not to. But there's no need for the advantages to come at a crippling expense.

And reflow if only one of the annoyances with pdf. I like to be able to convert my books into something else, or edit it. I call not being able to do so a crippling expense.

I'd guess it was rather to co-opt the ePub fanboys into a format they can like... Adobe Digital Editions... so that when the switch is made to PDF in the future, it will hurt them less.

I like ePub, I hate ADE. It's laggy, don't understand css perfectly, add some useless drm, no linux support and the list goes on... I only deal with it to download and un-drm. I long for the day publishers will drop drm and we can have it our way.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

It seams that pdf need to be tagged for reflow right ? What if the pdf you want to read isn't tagged or badly tagged ? And reflow if only one of the annoyances with pdf. I like to be able to convert my books into something else, or edit it).

While i agree e-book needs better formating, pdf is NOT a solution.

???

What the hell???

Are you asking what happens when an eBook is badly made? And suggesting that badly made eBooks are the reason PDF is not a viable eBook format?

I'm sorry... but people need to get it through their head that as long as they need to edit their eBooks, the eBook is fundamentally broken and not worth whatever money was paid for it.

I cannot take any argument seriously that relies on the present utter immaturity of the eBook market for recommendation as to what format to use.

Yes, today you are better off getting an ePub and either suffering the poor quality or fixing it yourself by turning it into PDF via LaTeX. Once publishers start doing their jobs with regards to eBooks: PDFs will look good. They will be designed for eBook reading device screen sizes. They will reflow suitably. End of story.

What if you get a badly made eBook? By God, I bet it will look bad! And if you can't fix it? Hmmm.... maybe you'll get a damn refund, like you do when a movie you purchase is unwatchable due to some technical error.

People just seem rabidly keen on preserving the current utterly ludicrous status quo of paying for the privilege to fix eBooks put out by multi-million dollar publishers (and others).

- Ahi

[EowynCarter]

I'm sorry... but people need to get it through their head that as long as they need to edit their eBooks, the eBook is fundamentally broken and not worth whatever money was paid for it.

True. And the one time i had to do it, i asked a refund.

But do you think pdf will alway be perfectly formated ? editing ePub is easier, and the publishers don't manage that. Think again ! Pdf can be badly formated. And comming from the publishers, they will be. But you won't be able to fix it, you're totally screwed.
And there are tons of others reasons you might want to edit e-books.

ePub CAN look good, where the publishers doing their job.

Are you asking what happens when an eBook is badly made? And suggesting that badly made eBooks are the reason PDF is not a viable eBook format?

Nope, because, in term of programming, ePub is way easier. Why do you think calibre's pdf support is crap ? Certainly not because of Kovid.
Plus, ePub was created and thought for that. It will do a better job than pdf with a few improvement and once used properly. Technicaly speaking, pdf is outdated.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

True. And the one time i had to do it, i asked a refund.

But do you think pdf will alway be perfectly formated ? editing ePub is easier, and the publishers don't manage that. Think again ! Pdf can be badly formated. And comming from the publishers, they will be. But you won't be able to fix it, you're totally screwed.
And there are tons of others reasons you might want to edit e-books.

ePub CAN look good, where the publishers doing their job.

The potential for quality ePub seems much lower than that for PDF. In fact, I'd like to see a good ePub file on my PRS-505 someday. Anyone got a "cream of the crop" file that can be viewed? I've not seen anything good on this site yet. Of course, I could blame Sony's renderer, but since people are blaming formats for things that are the fault of someone else entirely....

Of course we're not supposed to trust the publishers to deliver content in a proper presentation. We're supposed to expect that they'll forever only be a useless lump that can provide mediocre html files for the end-users to proofread and reformat. As unrealistic as it seems, I hope that they become a bit more progressive than that.

Nope, because, in term of programming, ePub is way easier. Why do you think calibre's pdf support is crap ? Certainly not because of Kovid.
Plus, ePub was created and thought for that. It will do a better job than pdf with a few improvement and once used properly. Technicaly speaking, pdf is outdated.

It'd be funny if any professional used a program like Calibre. Well it'd be funny after the depression goes away.

[EowynCarter]

Of course, I could blame Sony's renderer, but since people are blaming formats for things that are the fault of someone else entirely....

The one to blame for the poor renderer are adobe, not sony. Silly page numbers, ignoring some ccs, absent hyphenation support, all adobe's ! (well, i need to check about hyphenation)
ADOBE, you know, the people who created that format you hold so dear, and they can't figure out how to program a decent renderer.
The mobipoket reader, through all the default mobi have, works way better.

It'd be funny if any professional used a program like Calibre. Well it'd be funny after the depression goes away.

That's what nice with ePub, lots of program to read create or edit

And an other point : pdf is more or less dependent of adobe. e-books market should be independent of any company whatsoever.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ahi

That doesn't sound true... Elfwreck. Not with regards to published books. Do you have well-founded reasons to believe so?

In the ebook market, certainly. Many people have verified typo's and OCR errors in ebooks, that are the result of auto-OCR programs with the "correction" obviously being "throw it into Word and run the spellcheck." So any OCR error that resulted in a real word stays in the final copy.

In pbooks, less so, but there have been the same kinds of things: there, they're, and their applied randomly; apostrophe abuse that any fourth-grade student should be able to catch; weird hyphenations not caught.

I don't think any (large) publishing houses have eliminated human proofreading, but they've cut back on it, expecting programs to catch the bulk of it and assuming readers won't care about what gets through.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

The potential for quality ePub seems much lower than that for PDF. In fact, I'd like to see a good ePub file on my PRS-505 someday. Anyone got a "cream of the crop" file that can be viewed?

Check samples from Hindawi:
http://www.hindawi.com/epub.html

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

In the ebook market, certainly. Many people have verified typo's and OCR errors in ebooks, that are the result of auto-OCR programs with the "correction" obviously being "throw it into Word and run the spellcheck." So any OCR error that resulted in a real word stays in the final copy.

In pbooks, less so, but there have been the same kinds of things: there, they're, and their applied randomly; apostrophe abuse that any fourth-grade student should be able to catch; weird hyphenations not caught.

I don't think any (large) publishing houses have eliminated human proofreading, but they've cut back on it, expecting programs to catch the bulk of it and assuming readers won't care about what gets through.

Yup.
The French harry potter 5, in addition to a bad print, also have some errors big enough for me to notice (As i'm seriously dyslexic, that means a lot).

Check samples from Hindawi:
http://www.hindawi.com/epub.html

It gets my opus to crash.

[ahi]

So... who is going to bravely try to address the hyphenation issue I raised?

Without at least the hyphenation issue disappearing or being resolved, reflow cannot match the typographic quality of even not particularly brilliantly typeset fixed layout documents.

And please stop with the "do you think PDFs are going to be perfect?" stuff. If professional attention has been given to them, there's no chance they'll be worse than the equivalent ePub. Not to mention that the people on here that are loudest about wanting to be able to edit their eBooks also seem to be the least competent to actually improve said eBooks from a typographic perspective.

Having to convert/alter/edit/adjust/reformat an eBook is an abnormal situation that cannot continue to happen, if eBooks are ever to receive wider adoption. Surely we're not suffering from Stockholm Syndrome so badly that we have to pretend otherwise. If and when publishers start taking eBooks seriously, the average person's fanciful ideas will no longer be able to improve upon the already professionally prepared eBook.

- Ahi

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Check samples from Hindawi:
http://www.hindawi.com/epub.html

I'm not really sure I'd call anything from a scientific journal to be "cream of the crop" with regards to design and typography (and I spent many years working in STM publishing). However, what I will say is that those you linked to tend to take advantage of some of the more "advanced" features of the ePub format (which aren't really all that advanced, IMHO)--things like decent layout for mathematical equations, use of vector graphics, etc.

I'm moderately proud of the ePub I slapped together in a few days, but even then, the extent of the layout/design doesn't go much beyond properly proportioned drop caps, some faked small caps for the chapter titles, and graphics that scale depending on the viewer's screen size (try adjust the window size in the desktop ADE to see what I mean). Hardly "cream of the crop", but among one of the nicer formatted ePubs I've seen, if I may humbly say so.

[EowynCarter]

So... who is going to bravely try to address the hyphenation issue I raised?

Without at least the hyphenation issue disappearing or being resolved, reflow cannot match the typographic quality of even not particularly brilliantly typeset fixed layout documents.

It is possible to do it. Once again, blame adobe for not doing their job.