eBook common sense 101

[cfrizz]

Thank you. All I want is an ebook, I just save my word doc as an rtf, and have Calibre do all the work. They come out just fine. Most of them look far better than the supposed "professionally published" ebooks!

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

How many people are likely to look at the code? Sometimes "good" is good enough.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

I've never seen one of those. Have you got one I can look at? I'd be interested to see if they are any easier to convert.

All of the PDFs on my site (including the free content) are ADA-compliant PDFs. Check one out.

If you have a PDF reader that is ADA-compliant (like Adobe Reader for almost any device), the PDFs will reflow with minimal problems. If you use a third-party PDF reader, there's a good chance it's not ADA-compliant, so it won't reflow properly. This is why most ebook device users hate PDFs: They mostly try to read them on third-party apps, they won't reflow, and people blame the PDFs instead of the apps.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

How many people are likely to look at the code? Sometimes "good" is good enough.

Most of time I go looking at the code because something annoyed me.
Can be "just" overlarge margin, weirdo formating. And that one I went looking at because it got the orizon to lag...

And it's easy to make something good : keep it simple. Keep the number of style to a reasonable amount. Once you get the ePub converted from odt, docx or whatever, sigil and a few regexp can clean most of the mess in no time.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

If you have a PDF reader that is ADA-compliant (like Adobe Reader for almost any device), the PDFs will reflow with minimal problems. If you use a third-party PDF reader, there's a good chance it's not ADA-compliant, so it won't reflow properly. .

So it won't work on any of the e-ink devices?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

So it won't work on any of the e-ink devices?

Not if they use most third-party PDF readers, and not an Adobe product. (Not a bad reason to contact your reader's manufacturer and demand compliant reading apps.)