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Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

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Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#131

Post by jamesfinlayson »

warpspin wrote: post #70

While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there's also simply the deeper story here, that "the web's" handling of paged media and the CSS paged media specs (to which his epub problem is related) is a never ending shitshow. Not only for epubs, for everybody who actually wants to print to real paper, too, ideally with a working cross browser solution. Mistake is largely not in the specs, but…

Completely agree - I wrote a book that had some specific layout requirements in HTML, and while it was easier to get something up and running than LaTeX, getting the printing part right was very painful (not least of all because no browsers seem to support things like page numbering).

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#132

Post by jamesfinlayson »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #130
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adhesive tape? Don't - it yellows too.

I use thin 2" tape to wrap the corners and the oldest one is probably 10 years old and no yellowing.

Might depend on the age and or brand of the tape - I've seen old tape (30+ years maybe) that has yellowed. I have a 15 years old book at home with some tape and it's okay, except for the tape that wasn't in contact with the book (which is yellowed).

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#133

Post by cratermoon »

pwg wrote: post #103
pseingatl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF's are size agnostic, by the way. We think of them as being restricted to A4 or letter paper, but you can generate a pdf of almost any size.

The PDF specification is size agnostic. A given, created, PDF, is fixed to whatever size it was created to represent. Acrobat claims to be able to "reflow" some PDF's, but whatever it is doing is more black magic voodoo than anything else, given how text layout is represented inside the PDF format. The text layout becomes (essentially) a stream of instructions to "move current point to 123,456" and "place this text a…

There is a practical limit. "Page dimensions are not limited by the format itself. However, Adobe Acrobat imposes a limit of 15 million by 15 million inches, or 225 trillion in2 (145,161 km2)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF>

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#134

Post by eleveriven »

lxgr wrote: post #122
eleveriven wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! EPUBs are great for novels or anything you just want to read line-by-line

They're really great for anything I want to read on my phone, including technical books. I'll take a slightly-less-great ePub over a PDF I have to scroll around or use terrible reflow heuristics via some reader any day.

PDFs on smaller screens - it’s like wrestling with the page just to read a single line

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#135

Post by eleveriven »

zargon wrote: post #125
lxgr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're really great for anything I want to read on my phone, including technical books. I'll take a slightly-less-great ePub over a PDF I have to scroll around or use terrible reflow heuristics via some reader any day.

Really, the point is, why can't we have both? I use and enjoy epubs extensively, but also in many contexts I strongly prefer PDF.

Each format has its strengths

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#136

Post by chrismorgan »

freeone3000 wrote: post #101
carlosjobim wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One question: Why do people make PDFs in A4 format? Wouldn't it make better sense to start making them in A5 or A6, so that they could be better read on e-readers, phones, and on part of a computer screen (which is landscape oriented)?

PDFs are in Letter (rarely A4) format, quite simply, to be printed on Letter paper :) The computer screen view is secondary.

> PDFs are in Letter (rarely A4)

You must be from North America. In the rest of the world, it’s always A4. I encounter A4 PDFs fairly often, but don’t know how long it would be since I encountered Letter, but easily years.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#137

Post by pentagrama »

zargon wrote: post #55

Another frustrating thing with ebooks is that you can't get them in PDF format any more. So much time is spent making a nicely fomatted hardcopy edition, then the ebook is only available as a terribly auto-converted epub that throws away all the layout and style. Particularly cookbooks, as well as anything technical, I just can't stand how lazy, ugly, and difficult to read the epubs are. All the tooling already exist…

I love the PDF format in many ways. Its adoption is widespread, so you can send it with confidence. It's an ISO standard, "self-contained" (a single file, unlike HTML). However, something I’d love for the specification to incorporate is responsive design, which would significantly improve accessibility given the proliferation of mobile devices.
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