[libreoffice-users] Re: New LibreOffice Book

Re: James Knott's comment: I *generally* agree that text-centric e-pubs are a
better (or at least more flexible) choice on tablets, but Bruce's pdf
version seemed just fine to me (on a Galaxy 10-S) and I'm an old cranky
retiree with astigmatism and such.

I suspect that part of the reason for the aversion to pdfs on tablets is due
to poor layout or pdfs that are constructed from scanned pages (some
magazines just don't "get" how annoying low res page scans are).

Another issue is that the font sizes can be changed quite easily in e-pubs
which isn't an option with pdfs. So for smaller tablets (or are those
phones? I can't keep up), the pdf is less flexible.

I've published five books in the past few years that relied to one degree or
another on diagrams, charts, illustrations, etc. that need to have a
particular association with text elements. I've tried a number of supposed
solutions to converting those to e-pubs (there's even a LibreOffice
extension called Writer2xhtml export filters that purports to do this and
other conversions), but the whole concept behind "reflow" and other
underpinnings that make e-pubs so useful helps prevent them from being
adaptable for use with "formatted" documents.

As the author stated, if anyone has a good generic solution, I'd love to
hear it. I do believe, however, that if the original document is designed
reasonably well, and the pdf is produced with tablet reading in mind, it
remains the best choice for documents where illustrations are required.

Note for the author: One compromise I did make with one of my books was to
use a utility (e.g. pdf-shuffler in Linux or similar) that permits bulk
cropping of those portions of the margins that serve, as you described, to
provide space for binding on one side and hand holding or margin notations
on the other. This effectively magnifies the body text area for use on
devices like tablets where the readers usually offer space for holding and
permit note taking in software. In this manner, there only needs to be one
"source" pdf with another "trimmed" one which I simply name
filename-trimmed.pdf. I reduced all margins to a much smaller value, and
that actually worked quite well, although as someone in this thread said,
these sorts of publication work best as actual printed books.

-Frank



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