Beautiful eBooks

[charleski]

Brooks, I can understand your frustration with the poor quality of the User Agents in current ereaders, but I have to agree with the others - anything that's not designed to reflow is a dead-end. Of course, PDFs can reflow if they're properly tagged and the reader supports it, but then all your careful design gets lost, and footnotes and ornaments go walkabout.

I think the critical thing to remember is that ereaders are still in a state of flux, even if that flux seems glacial at times. In five years' time (hmm, maybe ten...) we'll have much better machines which will render a well-designed epub with much greater fidelity, and have all the advantages of reflowability. Proper justification and hyphenation are a function of processor speed and power usage. Proper footnotes should be coming with the next version of the epub standard, drop caps can already be done with ease in epub.

Yes, you can't change the font-size on paper books, but that's one of the main advantages of ebooks, especially for those with older eyes. Reflowability means you can read the same file on a 4" device and on a 10" one, this makes things easier for both consumer and producer. It might be feasible to juggle different versions for different screens when dealing with a small press, but on a larger scale it would be a nightmare, we already have enough problems with differing ebook formats (though, fair enough, PDF would relieve some of those).

The current epub standard has some well-known flaws (mobipocket isn't even worth considering in this vein), but even so it's capable of supporting a rich design, though frankly I think too much ornamentation sometimes gets in the way of things.

Print still has its uses (it'll be a long time before digital systems can rival the quality and scale of the printing you get in Lenswork), and ebooks need to build on their particular strengths rather than try to emulate the printed word exactly.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

As a publisher, I can understand the frustration people have with the unattractive formatting of most eBooks. <SNIP>

I only use PDFs for my own books, and anticipate that I will continue to do so as long as I persist in ebook reading, at least until something else is able to look decent. I think it is unfortunate that so few people and so few publishers actually care about the quality of their products, but there's not much one can do. I think people in this community have largely dug their own trenches already, and you're not going to get people to let go of the sources of justification they've been clinging to for a while.

For your PDF, I recommend the use of an optical margin, especially since the large text size is producing a lot of hyphenation.

[Sweetpea]

I've been reading PDF on my BBMini ever since I (re)discovered LaTeX. I make it up so it looks good on my 5" and doing so will make it look good on my 6" as well (a slightly larger font-face).

Originally Posted by toddos

Just hope you never need to change the font size, or you'll have to regenerate your PDF.

That's easy, actually. If you keep your source files and create a script, it shouldn't be too much work. It takes me about 2 minutes to re-create my epub, mobi and PDF files (all done with one script).

[MrPLD]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

I've been reading PDF on my BBMini ever since I (re)discovered LaTeX. I make it up so it looks good on my 5" and doing so will make it look good on my 6" as well (a slightly larger font-face).

And the great upside of using the TeX engine is that justification and hyphenation actually comes out nice. I've been spoilt too much with (La)TeX and scowl at the line-based justification engines in eReaders to date

I should try generating a PDF specifically for the K3 to see how it comes out :-)

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Tanzaku

The solution to solve all the problems in my first paragraph is to simply create the PDF for the 6“ screen size of the typical eReader.

So what happens when I want to read it on my 10" iPad?

Sorry, but I really have to disagree with you. PDFs are not the answer, because all reading devices are not the same size.

[lene1949]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I have to agree with you-- a PDF well formatted to fit my reader beats the living heck out of any epub. I recognize the utility of having a book format that scales to all sizes of reader screens, but for myself, I almost always take the time to reformat a book into a nice clean, fully justified PDF before I read it.

OT... Argeegee.. you really need another avatar... I stop just to look at that cute dumbo rat...

PS... I don't thing PDF is good for e-readers... I like to change the size of the font to fit my eyes...

I suppose I got distracted by the rat... lol

[MrPLD]

Certainly PDFs aren't the answer for general purpose device formatting - though it's sometimes nice to see what the results could be like if the eReaders had top quality rendering engines

Paul

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

Certainly PDFs aren't the answer for general purpose device formatting...Paul

True, but when targeted for specific devices, that's another story.

[MrPLD]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

True, but when targeted for specific devices, that's another story.

Absolutely agreed

(now, if the eReaders could just use the free-to-use TeX hyphenation & justification engine, we'd all be a lot happier)

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

So what happens when I want to read it on my 10" iPad?

Sorry, but I really have to disagree with you. PDFs are not the answer, because all reading devices are not the same size.

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

True, but when targeted for specific devices, that's another story.

This.

True, a PDF isn't the answer to the problem. But a PDF that is custom generated for a certain size/requirement could be. And that's not as hard as it sounds. I could update my scripts so I could chose a certain template, one for a 5" screen, one for a 6", one for a 7" 16x9 screen, one for a 7" 4x3 screen, etc... I already have a different template for Dutch books (hyphenation is different), which I set in my source (default is English template, in my source I can override this default with a different template).

[MrPLD]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

This.
And that's not as hard as it sounds. I could update my scripts so I could chose a certain template, one for a 5" screen, one for a 6", one for a 7" 16x9 screen, one for a 7" 4x3 screen, etc..

And you can then make it generate all varieties at once and call it something like the meat-tenderizer ... or marinator - but the results would look stunning, assuming you have a decent source to work from (would be lovely here direct from our LaTeX/LyX sources )

Paul.

[Logseman]

What could be interesting is if you download a PDF from the reader itself per wifi, it could detect automatically which size the reader has and give out an according PDF file.

[Kevin2960]

Lets face it, what most of us want from the NEXT generation of eReaders is FULL pdf support, regardless of screen size,

I'm not sure how practical that is on 5 & 6 inch screens, but it is what we want, Right ?

[MrPLD]

Well, as has been mentioned here before, PDF support is nice but I'd prefer to see ebook rendering engines improved instead, then we can have beautifully formatted paragraphs without being forced to use pre-generated pages.

If you instead demand reflowable-PDF support from both ends you'll just end up with text that looks as bad as what we already have. It'd be like filing down a hammer claw to make it behave like a screwdriver.

The only really effective way to experience PDFs on an eReader is to have a lot of resolution and screen size (eg, Kindle DX); everything else will be a compromise.

[bjones6416]

But... 4.29 MB for one book? I gasp a little bit when one of my books in calibre is 1 MB! That's the beauty of e-books to me -- the fact that they take up so little space when you compare them to music or photos. I don't want my files to be that large.