PDF is not an eBook format

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by ahi

The approach that satisfies experts can be implemented alongside with the solution to satisfy people with partly different, and largely lower expectations.

Yes, so where are the experts doing it? If they're not, then all opposing ePuB does is slow down the development of ebooks.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by jbjb

But if the effort required to satisfy the experts is disproportionate, it'll never get done, and in any case would be better spent on other things.

Good thing then that it isn't. A slight adjustment for the ePub specification (which already includes theoretical support for containing PDFs along with the XHTML) and a sensible (and very probably relatively minor) adjustment to the ePub reading software (usually made by Adobe for a number of eBook reading devices anyways) could have us, by the end of next year, receiving books that have fixed layouts with regular and large font sizes for standard eBook screen sizes, but also have XHTML to fallback on if the user has a different size display or needs a different size font.

Originally Posted by jbjb

No - should I? I've got a lot of books on my list.

Methinks you should. It has earned me some praise from a non-sympathizer recently. (Jellby's work is based on the LaTeX source of my own PDF version.)

It's a 4000-5000+ page (6" page, at least) story, and all of it is rather conversational, very entertaining, and also educational in terms of being a window onto Casanova's time period. Not vulgar either, though amorous endeavors do definitely become focal points with some regularity.

- Ahi

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

And that's why having, in an ebook standard, a way of marking ambigious words with an appropriate marker so a dictionary will get the correct meaning and it'll be treated properly by the grammar engine is worthwhile.

And who is responsible for marking these words with the correct meaning? What about cases where the author is using deliberate ambiguity?

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Your entire argument is dependent on people sticking with a few screen sizes, Ahi. I simply don't see any chance of that in the future, and any change in screen size when you move devices screws you over, you lose your formatting.

Personally, I'd pay arround 20% of a paper book's price for a fixed-format book. For a format designed for reflow? More. Quite a bit more, because the effort will have gone into a format I can keep and use on multiple devices. Quit trying to control what I read on. "Common sizes" indeed - that's just another way of saying "Whatever a few powerful manufacturers like, screw the rest of you".

(And on tiny mobile screens, er yea...does anyone bother trying?)

I'd pay less for something that clearly has jack squat of effort and professionalism invested in it. Like paying art gallery prices in a kindergarten class.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

And who is responsible for marking these words with the correct meaning? What about cases where the author is using deliberate ambiguity?

I'm not suggesting it be mandatory, I'm suggesting it be allowed in the format.

Ahi - And given the current way PDF's work, I don't support your efforts because each ebook being 50+MB would be a major pain in the backside! The only way to store multple page formats is to have a seperate PDF for each.


LDBoblo - With PDF, the fallbacks are a basically unreadable "reflow", if it's even allowed, or to making the text unreadably small, or having to scroll in multiple directions to read the book. Given I rarely read an entire book on one screen size, those are the only choices I have with a PDF. This is worth less to me than a reflow format which works moderately well and where I can scroll down only, with a font size I chose.

If you want to abandon the advantages of ebooks, great, but don't try and impose that onto me. Strongly and active work on a reflow format is, fortunately, precise what's happening.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

And who is responsible for marking these words with the correct meaning? What about cases where the author is using deliberate ambiguity?

Then the bookmaker will have to (having hopefully been intelligent enough to discern the author's intent) mark the word as one that may not be hyphenated at all.

Hopefully it doesn't end up being a word like:
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswe rkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

or

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio gogogoch

or
Nordöstersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranlä ggningsmaterielunderhållsuppföljningssystemdiskuss ionsinläggsförberedelsearbeten

or

λοπαδο*τεμαχο*σελαχο*γαλεο*κρανιο*λειψανο*δριμ*υπο *τριμματο*σιλφιο*καραβο*μελιτο*κατακεχυ*μενο*κιχλ* επι*κοσσυφο*φαττο*περιστερ*αλεκτρυον*οπτο*κεφαλλιο *κιγκλο*πελειο*λαγῳο*σιραιο*βαφη*τραγανο*πτερύγ ων

(Will eBook readers know how to hyphenate Greek words correctly, even if they won't concern themselves with Gikuyu?)

- Ahi

Ps.: Sorry.. not sure why the Greek is broken. All are single words, by the way... despite the forum display forcing word breaks.

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by ahi

Good thing then that it isn't. A slight adjustment for the ePub specification (which already includes theoretical support for containing PDFs along with the XHTML) and a sensible (and very probably relatively minor) adjustment to the ePub reading software (usually made by Adobe for a number of eBook reading devices anyways) could have us, by the end of next year, receiving books that have fixed layouts with regular and large font sizes for standard eBook screen sizes, but also have XHTML to fallback on if the user has a different size display or needs a different size font.

What about the per-book effort to produce these fixed layouts? I'd rather that was spent on better proof reading of content. That makes much more of a difference to me than perfect hyphenation etc.

Methinks you should. It has earned me some praise from a non-sympathizer recently. (Jellby's work is based on the LaTeX source of my own PDF version.)

It's a 4000-5000+ page (6" page, at least) story, and all of it is rather conversational, very entertaining, and also educational in terms of being a window onto Casanova's time period. Not vulgar either, though amorous endeavors do definitely become focal points with some regularity.

I'll add it to my list , then. Thanks for the tip!

/JB

[Timoleon]

ahi,

Your comment:

"...despite being firmly of the opinion that read eBooks on anything and everything that has a charger is a passing fad..."

Can you expound on this? I guess I'm surprised --- I see that you are a Sony PRS-505 owner. The reader can't be that bad, even with typography less than perfect, that you think that reading on a portable device doesn't have a future?

[susan_cassidy]

Although beautifully made books are pretty to look at, I am mostly interested in reading novels. I now prefer ebooks to paper books, partly because I can increase the font slightly.

As long as the font is nicely readable, the paragraphs are clearly delineated, italics and bolding readable, etc., I don't really care about someone trying to lay out the page prettily.

Typography is necessary for some things, but I don't always like the font choices in printed books: some are harder to read than necessary. For ebooks, I just want good, readable text, not beauty.

[WillAdams]

susan_cassidy wrote:
>Typography is necessary for some things,
>but I don't always like the font choices
>in printed books: some are harder to read
>than necessary. For ebooks, I just want
>good, readable text, not beauty.

If it's not easy to read, then it's not good typography which is, ``the art or craft of setting type so as to honour its content.''

William

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

The Knuth & Plass paper which I cited has a formal proof and discussion of the impossibility of finding the perfect set of breaks for a paragraph.

But why use hyphenation on the reader, when it can be pre-hyphenated in advance?

Build a hyphenation database, and let automated engine insert soft hyphens EVERYWHERE. When there is ambiguity or a word that is not in the dictionary/database, ask user for intervention.

If the reader has a correct handling of soft-hyphens (ADE, even 1.71, doesn't), isn't this a solution for hyphenation of the reflowable formats?

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Timoleon

ahi,

Your comment:

"...despite being firmly of the opinion that read eBooks on anything and everything that has a charger is a passing fad..."

Can you expound on this? I guess I'm surprised --- I see that you are a Sony PRS-505 owner. The reader can't be that bad, even with typography less than perfect, that you think that reading on a portable device doesn't have a future?

Sorry, Timoleon... I meant reading books on blackberries, iPhones, and such.

I think dedicated eBook reading devices are here to stay and are already pretty great, if still immature.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by jbjb

What about the per-book effort to produce these fixed layouts? I'd rather that was spent on better proof reading of content. That makes much more of a difference to me than perfect hyphenation etc.

What makes you think that it's an either-or proposition? It seems a counter-intuitive assumption to me. And, to be frank, any time the publisher decides to save on getting typography or even just the hyphenation part right will not be time re-allotted to additional proofreading.

There is, I'm rather sure, no chance of improving the content accuracy of eBooks by arguing for relaxing the typographic standards thereof.

And as I've noted a good few times though, good quality typography is not difficult or time-consuming to do with the right tools and technologies, and even great typography is not prohibitively so, even for a small publisher.

Originally Posted by Ankh

But why use hyphenation on the reader, when it can be pre-hyphenated in advance?

Build a hyphenation database, and let automated engine insert soft hyphens EVERYWHERE. When there is ambiguity or a word that is not in the dictionary/database, ask user for intervention.

If the reader has a correct handling of soft-hyphens (ADE, even 1.71, doesn't), isn't this a solution for hyphenation of the reflowable formats?

Do you really consider feasible a hyphenation database that contains all actual words it addresses, along with all their compounded, conjugated/declined (and apostrophe-laden?) forms? Even for languages unlike English, where prefixes, suffices, conjugations, and declensions can create over a 100 valid and sensible words from a 3 letter root word?

Given how utterly technically simple this is, you'd think all word processors would be using it by now. (Though "present" in English, and many words in other languages would continue to be incorrectly auto-hyphenated.)

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

As long as the font is nicely readable, the paragraphs are clearly delineated, italics and bolding readable, etc., I don't really care about someone trying to lay out the page prettily.

Perhaps you don't, but others do--and, based on what you write, so long as the font is nicely readable and the paragraphs clearly delineated you do not find pretty layout-work an affront.

This is a significant point...

A lot of people may not care about what they deride as "fancy typography", but are not negatively impacted when it is done right. People who care about "fancy typography", however, cannot enjoy books lacking what they consider to be "basic typographic quality".

- Ahi

[ahi]

On the topic of the idea of hyphenation dictionaries containing all words in a given language...

The below are 192 simple words fairly directly built/conjugated from the root word "ég", which means either "burn" (verb) or "sky" (noun) depending on context.

In this list, I ignored the root word's meaning as "sky" and focused only on meanings relating to the "burn" meaning--and not only is the list incomplete, it arguably contains 3 different "burn"-derived verb's conjugations and little else. I suspect with some time, and both meanings of the root considered, I could easily more than double the list, and might well be able to surpass a thousand words created from the single root in ways that are, to lesser or greater extent, applicable to all Hungarian words. (And while on this particular list no word has differing hyphenation depending on meaning, multiple words have several possible meanings, in some cases the different meanings being altogether different parts-of-speech... which would be relevant to any sort of grammar engine trying to use other words in the sentence to figure out what an ambiguous word with multiple-hyphenation might be. [i.e.: What will the engine do if half the sentence is made up of ambiguous words? Such is an entirely possible scenario.])

ég
égek
égsz
égel
égünk
égtek
égnek
égni
égnem
égned
égnie
égnünk
égnetek
égniük
égniök
éget
égetek
égetsz
égetel
égetünk
égettek
égetnek
égetni
égetnem
égetned
égetnie
égetnünk
égetnetek
égetniük
égetniök
égtet
égtetek
égtetsz
égtetel
égtetünk
égtettek
égtetnek
égtetni
égtetnem
égtetned
égtetnie
égtetnünk
égtetnetek
égtetniük
égtetniök
égettet
égettetek
égettetsz
égettetel
égettetünk
égettettek
égettetnek
égettetni
égettetnem
égettetned
égettetnie
égettetnünk
égettetnetek
égettetniük
égettetniök
égés
égetés
égtetés
égettetés
leég
leégek
leégsz
leégel
leégünk
leégtek
leégnek
leégni
leégnem
leégned
leégnie
leégnünk
leégnetek
leégniük
leégniök
leéget
leégetek
leégetsz
leégetel
leégetünk
leégettek
leégetnek
leégetni
leégetnem
leégetned
leégetnie
leégetnünk
leégetnetek
leégetniük
leégetniök
leégtet
leégtetek
leégtetsz
leégtetel
leégtetünk
leégtettek
leégtetnek
leégtetni
leégtetnem
leégtetned
leégtetnie
leégtetnünk
leégtetnetek
leégtetniük
leégtetniök
leégettet
leégettetek
leégettetsz
leégettetel
leégettetünk
leégettettek
leégettetnek
leégettetni
leégettetnem
leégettetned
leégettetnie
leégettetnünk
leégettetnetek
leégettetniük
leégettetniök
leégés
leégetés
leégtetés
leégettetés
megég
megégek
megégsz
megégel
megégünk
megégtek
megégnek
megégni
megégnem
megégned
megégnie
megégnünk
megégnetek
megégniük
megégniök
megéget
megégetek
megégetsz
megégetel
megégetünk
megégettek
megégetnek
megégetni
megégetnem
megégetned
megégetnie
megégetnünk
megégetnetek
megégetniük
megégetniök
megégtet
megégtetek
megégtetsz
megégtetel
megégtetünk
megégtettek
megégtetnek
megégtetni
megégtetnem
megégtetned
megégtetnie
megégtetnünk
megégtetnetek
megégtetniük
megégtetniök
megégettet
megégettetek
megégettetsz
megégettetel
megégettetünk
megégettettek
megégettetnek
megégettetni
megégettetnem
megégettetned
megégettetnie
megégettetnünk
megégettetnetek
megégettetniük
megégettetniök
megégés
megégetés
megégtetés
megégettetés

NOTE: And these are only present tense conjugations. If I add past tense, the list basically doubles. If I add conditional future (which does occur, in older books, in purposely antiquated or poetic use), the list triples effortlessly... for a grand total of about 570 words... despite still being a very very elementary list, barely making use of the full word-production capacity of Hungarian (for results many, and with such a simple root, most, of which are perfectly plausible in everyday speech).

So on further thought, I suspect I could reach 1000 words from the root, without ever even considering it's second meaning.