On 02/12/2012 11:08 AM, Barry Smith wrote:
When the PDF format was originally developed in 1993 many would actually print the document often for distribution or archival record. In some cases, documents are still printed for archival hard-copy records/use. E-book formats are designed for viewing the document on an e-book device. Thus the differences in how they behave.drew wrote:On Sat, 2012-02-11 at 07:10 -0800, Pedro wrote:drewjensen wrotePDF is just another throw back to printing on dead trees in this regard, where the creator of the file sets the size of the layout when the file is generated. This has additional implications, such as page counts and the use of page numbers in a table of contents and index,That is a little unfair on PDF! PDF is excellent for archiving documents as IF they were printed. It saves on trees and it saves on disk space (compared to digitized images of documents).Hi Pedro, 1st - if we continue this, and I would not mind at all, how about we kick it over to the discuss list? But for the moment. So we are in agreement - PDF does a great job of replicating the printed page.The fixed page size and numbering is extremely important when you are referring to some portion of a document. It doesn't make sense to say, "in the third paragraph of page 20" and then because the text was re-flowed to fit in a 3" screen that paragraph is in page 100...Well, stop thinking that way (hey didn't I adomish against such statement in a recent email...ah humans we are all schytzoid)... Instead of saying "see the scratch mark on tablet 4", use a hyperlink. It will be just as valid when the pages flow differently on different devices.Another big advantage of PDF (when loaded in a PC, Win or Linux, and probably on a Mac) is that you can embed the fonts so you know your page will look *exactly* like you designed it. Apparently this does not work in a Kindle, so it is expected that they will look different because fonts are being replaced (as in an epub)Yup - embedded fonts = hard coding. I'm not saying there is no place for PDF and it's like just that there are other ways to view the world, the new world. // drewJust my 2 cents ;) -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Write2epub-tp3732714p3735140.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.Hi, Group. I read the whole thread, and came back to this note as a jump-in point. My opinion is epub is fine for portable devices, and that PDF does it's best to duplicate the printed page.
My pet peeve (to consider) is that most PDF ebooks that I have used (and couldn't use) were either jpg pages (I had to tweak cups-PDF myself) or just not built to be "Searchable". When I open an e-book for a programming book or a reference book (no matter the format), I'm not looking to read it from cover to cover. I'm looking to find an answer to a problem. I know the keywords that I'm looking for, and I want to search. I don't want to roll through a TOC, I don't want to flip back to an index... I want to !search!. Before my Ubuntu box crashed, I had found a procedure using two Linux tools (one was called "cuniform" I believe). One tool would OCR the scanned graphic pages (for some reason it worked only with 150cpi/dpi scans) and create an XML list of words, and where they were on the page and on what page. The next step was h2-something which would merge the PDF and the XML list and create a "searchable" PDF. Please, continue with the war and peace treaties. I have included my one cent (used to be two cents, until the taxes went up... again).
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