PDF is not an eBook format

[Taylor514ce]

Originally Posted by ahi

Hell, I do not even see any realistic prospect of wider eBook reading device adoption until the typography issue is fixed.

- Ahi

That's where our opinions differ, then. I think the track record speaks for itself. People consume poor quality mass market paperbacks at a much higher rate than they do higher quality hardcover. Tabloids outsell magazines. Direct Mail marketers no longer care AT ALL about color fidelity. People increasingly get their news from websites built with the scantiest nod at typography, rather than newspapers.

I would love to see a PDF or descendant technology that stored the content once and layout/typographical information X times, in a single file, and the appropriate author/developer tool set, and for that technology to be adopted by the publishing industry for ebook production. I don't think it will be.

(Adobe, after all, has abandoned PostScript. They even abandoned DTP software for a time (remember PageMaker?). The PDF spec itself became so bloated that the graphics arts industry had to step in with PDF/X (and other "formats") which aren't so much separate formats as they are restrictions on the PDF format. They even suspended PDF development for a time to focus on the dead-end PPML technology. Adobe has brilliant engineering coupled with horrible marketing and product development.)

I'd love to be wrong about this, but think the truism "you can have it cheap, fast, and good - pick any two" will still apply.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by ahi

Utterly and complete nonsense.

Nope.
The day the publishers show me they can proofread one version properly, then, i might consider them able to proofread that many version.
And losing the ability to change font size on the fly would be a shame (I like bigger fonts when i'm tired)

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Taylor514ce

That's where our opinions differ, then.

It seems so.

I just don't see the production of typographically sound eBooks, even multiple versions, as at all onerous... and hence I am unable to appreciate any argument that somehow suggests that publishers can't be bothered to do it.

They don't today, because eBook reading device owners don't matter. That's clear as day.

When they start to matter to publishers, they will finally be treated like paying customers and publishers will make an attempt to get their products into acceptable shape before starting to accept cash. Particularly since it requires so little effort.

And average mass-market paperback quality is still light-years ahead of any ePub I've seen to date. If that's all publishers can be bothered for eBooks, it will still be a huge step forward... and it will still require fixed layouts... unless there will never be any widely circulated eBooks that aren't basically pulp fiction or classic fiction.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Nope.
The day the publishers show me they can proofread one version properly, then, i might consider them able to proofread that many version.
And losing the ability to change font size on the fly would be a shame (I like bigger fonts when i'm tired)

I'm sorry... we must live in parallel universes. I'll stop arguing because we are now firmly in a content-free downward spiral.

- Ahi

[WillAdams]

Abecedary, glad my commentary on Christie, Agatha: The Mysterious Affair at Styles. v2. 29 Aug 2009 was helpful --- I know much of what I commented on is a limitation of the viewer, but that's what this whole conversation turns on --- whether or no one should accept such limitations.

Obviously, I find it expedient to do so, and read a fair number of books on my Sony PRS-505 as either .lrf or epub, but I prefer it when I can find the time to make a typographically perfect .pdf (for those who're curious, I've .pdfs in the TeX Showcase, and also made the .pdf version of Mike Brotherton's _Star Dragon available from www.mikebrotherton.com )

The bottom line however, is one can have a typographically perfect .pdf _and_ internal tagging which allows it to be re-flowed, so .pdf is the only format offering the best of both worlds.

It's really remarkable that people choose to dismiss .pdfs as ebooks since they aren't reflowable, when pages as such are a fundamental aspect of the definition of a book, ``a written or printed work consisting of _pages_ glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.''

Perhaps we should create a new term which specifically encompasses ebooks which are reflowable w/ no fixed format of pages --- how does ``eScroll'' sound?

William

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by ahi

It seems inelegant, until LaTeX and/or PDF supports elegantly storing multiple layouts (without storing the content twice or more times over).

LaTeX actually already supports this. Take a look at the 6 different LaTeX-produced PDFs I have here. These are all produced with the same code.

I'm a bit busy right now, but I'll say more about later, and maybe provide some examples..

Sure, a human touch can get you slightly better output than relying on an algorithm exclusively. There is some human tweaking in my PDFs there (all stored in the same code, but only active at certain sizes.) But I hope no one would use this as an argument against using an algorithm that *does* know about kerning, hinting, leading, hyphenation, proper whitespace usage in favor of one that doesn't even attempt such things!

LaTeX knows the proper hyphenation of words of nearly all widespread languages, and words that do not occur in its list can be given custom hyphenation rules in the code. Searching the document to discover such words and embedding the proper hyphenation spots for them with the code would be very easy.

It does often have to make "choices" between different desiderata when they conflict, and does so with its badness rankings. Let me be clear: IT does it, not the person making the document. However, its weightings of certain bad features can be tweaked, and even made conditional on page or font size. (E.g., in a small layout like an ebook, I would think widow/orphan avoidance would be less important than avoiding large whitespace areas, but perhaps others would disagree, and perhaps even one could enter one's own preferences right in one's reader...) Maybe it's choices aren't always optimal, but this is a small price to pay for giving our readers the ability to change font and page sizes on the fly.

And I still think the algorithm could be improved, and close to perfected. I don't see what reasons there could be for thinking that the choices made by human typographers when hand-tweaking can't in principle be done by a computer.

OK, so maybe device manufacturers will be scared off by an unclear license. But why on Earth would anyone think that takes them off the hook from producing something at least as good? Even if they did have to reinvent the wheel, surely the fact that there are wheels out there is proof that it can be re-invented.

Maybe hardware specs on readers is quite up to this yet. I'm not even convinced of this, but even if it's true, we're not far off from something that can.

And until that is done, people could and should offer PDFs in multiple sizes. As mentioned, it's not that time consuming, and certainly doesn't require reproofreading the book multiple times.

As for typesetting multiple times... it's not so time consuming as to be prohibitive. These admittedly less than pristine versions (8 of them) were created with well less than a days work. 2-4 versions of an average length book shouldn't take longer than a day to do tolerably, or longer than a week to do really well.

Not nearly so long. It may have taken you that much time your first time, but once you've done this several times (and of course publishers would be doing this all the time), it would get faster and faster.

Typesetting is getting more crappy, but it's not because of ebooks, and certainly needn't be because of ebooks. If anything what's making it crappy is that people are getting used to reading the output of WYSIWYG editors like Word and their crappy output. and websites produced in effect with the same HTML interpreters as currently display ePubs on our readers, on a daily basis, and therefore, this level of quality is becoming acceptable in books too. I've read a number of paper academic books published by real presses lately that I'm fairly sure were typeset in Word, by amateurs, possibly the author him/herself. They definitely bother me. I blame Microsoft. OK, that's unfair, but any excuse to blame MS is OK with me.

[JSWolf]

One big downside for PDF....

Because it is fixed it's not all that good for people who need to have a larger font size on screen. because once it's made, that's it, it's made.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by frabjous

LaTeX actually already supports this. Take a look at the 6 different LaTeX-produced PDFs I have here. These are all produced with the same code.

Thank you, frabjous! Your post is a jewel in this thread. I will take a look at your page, and would be grateful if I could see your LaTeX source, to better understanding how you handled things.

In my mind, if typography does keep getting worse (and/or stays as bad as it is in eBooks), eventually small/independent publishers will start to make a killing by putting out far higher quality products than big publishers are... which is yet another reason that I do not see this trend being an unstoppable downward spiral.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One big downside for PDF....

Because it is fixed it's not all that good for people who need to have a larger font size on screen. because once it's made, that's it, it's made.

You are as brilliant and insightful as ever.

How is it under that bridge?

- Ahi

Ps.: Do you do this for jollies, or do you genuinely have reading comprehension problems, John?

[Jellby]

I believe ePUB books can include PDF documents (as alternative rendering)... that's certainly the best of both worlds (except for filesize).

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Jellby

I believe ePUB books can include include PDF documents (as alternative rendering)... that's certainly the best of both worlds (except for filesize).

I'd be delighted with such a compromise... and storage space will cease to be an issue soon enough... if it is even a real issue today.

- Ahi

[WillAdams]

jswolf said:
>One big downside for PDF....

>Because it is fixed it's not all that good for people who need to have a larger font size
>on screen. because once it's made, that's it, it's made.

And you're ignoring the possibility of a .pdf having tags and being reflowable, why?

Jellby, interesting bit on epub's including a .pdf as an alternative rendering --- I did a quick search but didn't find anything --- do you at least have a link for where it's mentioned in the specification?

William

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Jellby, interesting bit on epub's including a .pdf as an alternative rendering --- I did a quick search but didn't find anything --- do you at least have a link for where it's mentioned in the specification?

It is mentioned in the OPF spec:

For example, a spine itemref could reference a PDF document, that falls back to a PNG image, that in turn falls back to a OPS XHTML Content Document.

It should be possible to provide a PDF pre-rendered version of each document in the spine. I don't know, however, how this is supported, and whether it's possible for the user to select one version or the other.

[WillAdams]

Jellby, thanks for the OPF spec link --- is there a .epub or .pdf version of it yet?

William

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ahi

Check out The Memoirs of Casanova and find me an ePub or any other non-PDF version that looks better or at least as good, and post some screenshots.

The issue isn't, "can ePub look as good as optimized-for-your-screensize PDFs?" They cannot; no question there.

The issue is, "which will publishers be willing to spend money to produce: Optimized PDFs, or reflowable formats?" We have the answer to that one.

Name a company that sells PDFs sized for 6" screens.

The pro-ePub crowd aren't comparing the relative, possible merits of PDFs to ePubs; we're comparing the PDFs we can buy now, and expect to be able to buy in the next few years, to the ePubs we can buy now, and expect to be able to buy in the next few years.