PDF is not an eBook format

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Abecedary

This completely ignores that proofreading and typesetting duties are generally handled by entirely different people or departments, especially in an organization of, oh, say, five or more people. To me, this further emphasizes that it's not an either/or proposition.

In fairness, I think his thinking was about financial reallocation.

If the publisher doesn't spend X dollars on typography, they have X more dollars to spend on proofreading... whether they do it in-house, contract it out, or whatever else.

But, yes, I agree with you: I do not see it playing out like that.

- Ahi

[WillAdams]

Believe it or not, there's already been an effort to collect such words:

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb29-2/tb92hyf.pdf

William

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by ahi

In fairness, I think his thinking was about financial reallocation.

If the publisher doesn't spend X dollars on typography, they have X more dollars to spend on proofreading... whether they do it in-house, contract it out, or whatever else.

Partly financial allocation, but mostly allocation of management focus/prioritisation. The thing that really needs to happen for proof reading accuracy to be improved is for the management teams of publishers to believe that it's very, very important. Given that priority is always a relative thing, increasing the priority of something else (e.g. typography) will decrease the priority of proof reading.

/JB

[ahi]

Originally Posted by jbjb

Partly financial allocation, but mostly allocation of management focus/prioritisation. The thing that really needs to happen for proof reading accuracy to be improved is for the management teams of publishers to believe that it's very, very important. Given that priority is always a relative thing, increasing the priority of something else (e.g. typography) will decrease the priority of proof reading.

/JB

But this is primarily a problem with eBooks, anecdotal stories of random people having encountered printed books with typos before.

eBooks, as long as they are cared as little about as they are now, are not going to be assigned more resources. And once they are assigned more resources, publishers will start to see them as reflecting on them... meaning they will be compelled to improve them overall, not based on some bizarre lop-sided prioritization of (what most people in the profession would doubtless see as) equally valid concerns.

This is, I think, why I and Abecedary are skeptical of suggestions that typographic attention is somehow a threat, however indirect, to the content integrity of eBooks.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Believe it or not, there's already been an effort to collect such words:

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb29-2/tb92hyf.pdf

William

Hmmm... this is only about collecting exceptions. In other words correcting mistaken hyphenations (that resulted from the pattern-matching [and not word-matching] hyphenation algorithms) when somebody finds them. The difference with the approach suggested above is that it should not (other than through the editor's/compiler's carelessness) result in hyphenations at all for words that do not explicitly show up on the list with a hyphenation pattern... thus being less prone to give people a false sense of security about words having been correctly hyphenated, when, in fact, those words were not explicitly part of the wordlist that produced the hyphenation pattern rules.

- Ahi

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by ahi

But this is primarily a problem with eBooks, anecdotal stories of random people having encountered printed books with typos before.

eBooks, as long as they are cared as little about as they are now, are not going to be assigned more resources. And once they are assigned more resources, publishers will start to see them as reflecting on them... meaning they will be compelled to improve them overall, not based on some bizarre lop-sided prioritization of (what most people in the profession would doubtless see as) equally valid concerns.

This is, I think, why I and Abecedary are skeptical of suggestions that typographic attention is somehow a threat, however indirect, to the content integrity of eBooks.

I've certainly seen plenty of pbooks with proof-reading errors, so it's not exclusively an ebook problem, but I'll certainly grant you that its worse in ebooks. This is particualrly the case with ebooks which have been produced by OCR from paper masters. If/when pbooks are typically produced from digital sources, there's no reason why there should be any difference.

If you're confident that publishers will manage to get both proof-reading and typography right, then I certainly hope you're right. I have my doubts, however, and of the two I think the content accuracy is much more important so I'd rather they focused their management attention in that direction.

Clearly others will differ in their assignment of relative importance - I just find typos, spelling errors, grammatical errors and the like intensely irritating but don't really care about typography beyond basic legibility. I've spent too many years (decades!) reading long technical documents in vi on VT100 terminals to be at all upset by the limitations of a reflowed epub! :-)

/JB

[ahi]

Originally Posted by jbjb

I've certainly seen plenty of pbooks with proof-reading errors, so it's not exclusively an ebook problem, but I'll certainly grant you that its worse in ebooks. This is particualrly the case with ebooks which have been produced by OCR from paper masters. If/when pbooks are typically produced from digital sources, there's no reason why there should be any difference.

If you're confident that publishers will manage to get both proof-reading and typography right, then I certainly hope you're right. I have my doubts, however, and of the two I think the content accuracy is much more important so I'd rather they focused their management attention in that direction.

Clearly others will differ in their assignment of relative importance - I just find typos, spelling errors, grammatical errors and the like intensely irritating but don't really care about typography beyond basic legibility. I've spent too many years (decades!) reading long technical documents in vi on VT100 terminals to be at all upset by the limitations of a reflowed epub! :-)

/JB

I agree with most of what you wrote. Content *is* more important. But if the eBook reading public actually succeeds in permanently getting publishers to relax typographic standards for eBooks, it will be a definite loss... without necessarily, a proportional gain... if indeed any gain at all.

Such is my fear... albeit not a big fear, because I don't see paper book reading public as staunchly demanding quality typography either, and most publishers still go into the effort and expense to produce books that exceed the presumable minimum typographic expectations by a lot.

- Ahi

[Tuna]

Originally Posted by ahi

I agree with most of what you wrote. Content *is* more important. But if the eBook reading public actually succeeds in permanently getting publishers to relax typographic standards for eBooks, it will be a definite loss... without necessarily, a proportional gain... if indeed any gain at all.

Such is my fear... albeit not a big fear, because I don't see paper book reading public as staunchly demanding quality typography either, and most publishers still go into the effort and expense to produce books that exceed the presumable minimum typographic expectations by a lot.

- Ahi

Surely in the current situation, ebook publishers must feel that they can only give so much attention to typography and layout, because the various ebooks take much of their control away? Basic issues like fully justified text v.'s ragged right edges are arbitrarily decided by the particular firmware you're reading on. Despite being a 'fixed format', even PDF suffers from the vagaries of the particular device that is being used to render it.

Frankly though, this discussion is moot, because in over thirty pages of argument, all I've seen is people talking over each other trying to prove their particular point. It's great to see experts teasing out some of the subtleties of the issues at hand, but other than intellectual willy-waving (pardon the expression), this hardly achieves anything if all people do is re-iterate their particular world view time and time again without change. Like a dog playing the banjo, it's all very clever, but ultimately not very useful.

There's room here for a Knuth-like effort to produce a ebook composition and rendering system that focusses on producing the best possible environment for delivering an author's words to the reader in beautiful form. There's no reason for Adobe to own the entire problem space, and clearly a lot of community support and knowledge when it comes to improving the state of the art. If the right engineering lead could be tempted onto such a project from other community software, it would be possible to at least bring some of the issues discussed here under the control of the readers rather than being left to third parties who have other concerns.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Tuna

Surely in the current situation, ebook publishers must feel that they can only give so much attention to typography and layout, because the various ebooks take much of their control away? Basic issues like fully justified text v.'s ragged right edges are arbitrarily decided by the particular firmware you're reading on. Despite being a 'fixed format', even PDF suffers from the vagaries of the particular device that is being used to render it.

PDF does not suffer from this on any eBook reading device that supports it. And personally I find the suggest that publishers can only give so much attention to be silly. Doesn't take a lot of effort or a lot of work, so long as the right tools and the right format is used.

Originally Posted by Tuna

Frankly though, this discussion is moot, because in over thirty pages of argument, all I've seen is people talking over each other trying to prove their particular point. It's great to see experts teasing out some of the subtleties of the issues at hand, but other than intellectual willy-waving (pardon the expression), this hardly achieves anything if all people do is re-iterate their particular world view time and time again without change. Like a dog playing the banjo, it's all very clever, but ultimately not very useful.

Fully agree.

Originally Posted by Tuna

There's room here for a Knuth-like effort to produce a ebook composition and rendering system that focusses on producing the best possible environment for delivering an author's words to the reader in beautiful form. There's no reason for Adobe to own the entire problem space, and clearly a lot of community support and knowledge when it comes to improving the state of the art. If the right engineering lead could be tempted onto such a project from other community software, it would be possible to at least bring some of the issues discussed here under the control of the readers rather than being left to third parties who have other concerns.

Except that LaTeX already exists and PDF is an open standard.

People just seem to be bent on reinventing worse solutions to already solved problems.

- Ahi

[Lemurion]

I've read almost every post in this thread, and I came into it strongly opposed to PDF as an ebook format. The more I have learned about PDF, the more I have seen what it can be - though unfortunately rarely is.

I still avoid PDF ebooks, but that's more because the vast majority of PDFs I see are much less suited to my reader than EPUBs. This is not to say that EPUBs are necessarily better than PDF, but that most current publishers do a much worse job of meeting my needs in PDF than they do in EPUB.

What I really want is a readable font, proper proofreading and the ability to adjust the font to meet lighting conditions. I don't really care if it shifts between pre-rendered pages or reflows so long as my book is displayed in full screens without the annoying half-pages resized PDFs sometimes produce.

If a publisher does that with PDF, I'll happily buy in PDF. Until they do, I'll buy whatever format comes closest to meeting my needs. My preferred formats have changed in the past, I'm sure they may change in the future.

I would happily buy PDFs of the quality the people here produce - but nobody does that for the books I want to read. What I won't do is buy PDF knowing the reading experience will be worse than if I buy another format. Give me great PDFs and I'm all over them - give me bad ones and I'll go elsewhere. It's the results that matter.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by ahi

PDF does not suffer from this on any eBook reading device that supports it.

Except that apparently some devices don't quite support PDF with non-embedded fonts (but from the 14 standard fonts)[*] Or that they add the status bar on top of the PDF page, overlapping the bottom line if there's not enough margin.

[*] I may be wrong on this, but I think I've read that somewhere.

[Tuna]

Originally Posted by ahi

Except that LaTeX already exists and PDF is an open standard.

People just seem to be bent on reinventing worse solutions to already solved problems.

- Ahi

I thought it's been established that LaTeX is not suitable for e-readers because of the large installation size and relatively heavy processor demands? Did I also read that it requires full parsing of the entire document to do 'jump to' navigation? The other component missing seems to be editors tools - most of the ones I've seen are closer to programming environments than DTP tools.

Annoyingly my '505 has just run out of juice, but I'm fairly certain that the PDF books I've read on it have not been rendered faithfully, with odd effects as you zoom and rotate them. Simple issues like border removal suggest that PDF is not a 'solved problem' when it comes to display on relatively low resolution and size screens. Which really is the whole point of this discussion.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I've read almost every post in this thread, and I came into it strongly opposed to PDF as an ebook format. The more I have learned about PDF, the more I have seen what it can be - though unfortunately rarely is.

I still avoid PDF ebooks, but that's more because the vast majority of PDFs I see are much less suited to my reader than EPUBs. This is not to say that EPUBs are necessarily better than PDF, but that most current publishers do a much worse job of meeting my needs in PDF than they do in EPUB.

What I really want is a readable font, proper proofreading and the ability to adjust the font to meet lighting conditions. I don't really care if it shifts between pre-rendered pages or reflows so long as my book is displayed in full screens without the annoying half-pages resized PDFs sometimes produce.

If a publisher does that with PDF, I'll happily buy in PDF. Until they do, I'll buy whatever format comes closest to meeting my needs. My preferred formats have changed in the past, I'm sure they may change in the future.

I would happily buy PDFs of the quality the people here produce - but nobody does that for the books I want to read. What I won't do is buy PDF knowing the reading experience will be worse than if I buy another format. Give me great PDFs and I'm all over them - give me bad ones and I'll go elsewhere. It's the results that matter.

Yours, Sir, is an enlightened view!

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Tuna

I thought it's been established that LaTeX is not suitable for e-readers because of the large installation size and relatively heavy processor demands? Did I also read that it requires full parsing of the entire document to do 'jump to' navigation? The other component missing seems to be editors tools - most of the ones I've seen are closer to programming environments than DTP tools.

Annoyingly my '505 has just run out of juice, but I'm fairly certain that the PDF books I've read on it have not been rendered faithfully, with odd effects as you zoom and rotate them. Simple issues like border removal suggest that PDF is not a 'solved problem' when it comes to display on relatively low resolution and size screens. Which really is the whole point of this discussion.

1) I thought the opposite was the case in the discussion above.
2) The full two-pass parsing is not a deficiency of the program, but an arguable necessity of the task... though there could be other ways (look for the destination anchor only when the user "clicks" the link--however that would mean it would take twice as long to go to a page a chapter later in the book, than one two chapters later... and for large books, particular those with thousands of pages, this could get ugly fast).
3) There is no genuine need (or, I personally think) reason to use LaTeX (or anything like it) directly on eBook readers. Use a format that allows both reflow (i.e.: ePub [HTML]) and fixed formats (i.e.: PDF) in a single file, with some intelligent autodetection as to which the user might best best off with, but ultimately permitting manual override/selection as to which to view.

PDF rendering issues on the Sony PRS-505 sound bizarre to me. I've never encountered anything as such to date, and I basically only read PDFs... many generated by me in occasionally unorthodox ways.

Let me know more about this when your batteries are charged, I guess.

- Ahi

[WillAdams]

Tuna,

A LaTeX install can easily be in the 10s of MBs (see my earlier post and links)

LaTeX ran well on machines w/ 25 and 33MHz processors (see Alan Hoening's _TeX Unbound_ for a paean to running it on a NeXT Cube)

A very nice front-end for LaTeX is LyX --- http://www.lyx.org

If .pdfs aren't being rendered correctly on your PRS-505 that's a flaw in the renderer --- contact Sony so that they can fix it.

William