11–20 of 48 posts
> PDF is not portable on digital screens. It doesn’t scale. It’s not comfortable to read PDF files on a mobile or ebook readers
Arguing that PDFs are good for printing out, or better than some other format, doesn't actually address the issue ;-)
Most devices include a PDF reader, but not an EPUB reader. Yes, you can download one, but as a publisher, you can't expect your readers to jump through that hoop.
Rendering a Microsoft Word/Powerpoint document as a PDF is a good thing as then one does not need a Doc/Docx/PPT/pptx viewer anymore while most devices come with a PDF viewer builtin (eg. Chrome :) (and as a bonus it kills the anims if they are there) this while keeping the formatting intact (some minor color changes though depending on one export it). I tend to keep a whole bunch of things I want to 'read later' in…
Do you publish on the Internet? Do you read a lot of publications on your digital devices? How about stopping using PDF for internet publications and using EPUB instead (or some other screen independent format)? Please, share your comments.
I think you may be getting down voted because it is generally considered bad form to submit your own blog unless it is a "Show HN" but if the content is good it can out weight that and an article can be up voted anyway. But if you do submit your own content it is probably best to let the content speak for itself vs trying to solicit HN as a discussion forum.
Rendering a Microsoft Word/Powerpoint document as a PDF is a good thing as then one does not need a Doc/Docx/PPT/pptx viewer anymore while most devices come with a PDF viewer builtin (eg. Chrome :) (and as a bonus it kills the anims if they are there) this while keeping the formatting intact (some minor color changes though depending on one export it). I tend to keep a whole bunch of things I want to 'read later' in…
Reading PDF on mobile is possible, but far less comfortable than EPUB / MOBI...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading PDF on mobile is possible, but far less comfortable than EPUB / MOBI...
I would have agreed until I got an ipad mini 2 (for safari testing), screen resolution is high enough that it's close to print experience.
IMO, reflowing text is big advantage if you're going for "portability accross screen sizes".
Most devices include a PDF reader, but not an EPUB reader. Yes, you can download one, but as a publisher, you can't expect your readers to jump through that hoop.
EPUB / MOBI reader is not a problem this days
The main issue I think we all have with the format is that people make docs that are almost impossible to read on a small screen.
There are ways around this: 1. Tagged PDFs present the underlying content and semantics in order to reflow for accessibility purposes though right now very few people seems to use this feature and 2. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to make PDF pages closer to a paperback book rather than an A4 page with the resulting shorter line length and reduced margins.
PDF is indeed more complex than plain HTML with some cribbed CSS but in many ways it's a lot better: 1. It truly in portable in the sense that every computer will render it in exactly the same way, 2. It packages up all assets in an efficient manner (only the glyphs that are needed are included, not the entire font with all glyphs and position hints like web fonts), 3. The expensive layout computation is done once, on a computer in a galaxy far far away from my battery limited phone, and 4. PDFs are (by convention) free from all of the cacophony of crap like share buttons and navigation chrome and ads and articles-you-may-enjoy fluff.
The format itself is actually not that bad, it's a text format in that it's relatively easy to open up a text editor and bang one out. The only inconveniences are the places where you need to state exactly how long strings are (which your text editor can help with) and the creation of the index at the end (which I've been cheating by just running my hand created PDFs through a PDF lint-like utility.
The reason why most PDFs look crazy when opened up in a text editor is that the streams are almost always compressed. You can uncompress with them "qpdf --stream-data=uncompress in.pdf out.pdf"
My first thought on this is that EPUB is not fully portable either ... it's just non-portable in a different set of circumstances. If you want to publish on the internet, for general consumption, just use plain html. That's about as portable as you can get without moving into raw text.
The great thing about EPUB is that all the files are bundled together in a single .epub file. You can copy the file and move it around without worrying about keeping the structure intact.
I think that perhaps the main issue currently present with EPUB is that EPUB readers aren't really part of the standard installation on devices. Pretty much every PC or smartphone you come across in the wild will have software installed to view PDFs, but the same isn't the case for EPUB. I think Apple have done a good thing by including an EPUB reader (iBooks) as part of macOS and iOS, but that's not the case for other operating systems.
It might be nice if web browsers could natively act as EPUB viewers, in the same way a number of them natively act as PDF viewers. That way, the user already has an EPUB viewer installed, and they don't have to go and find and install one.