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PDF is not portable in the digital world

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Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#21

Post by klodolph »

guidoism wrote: post #18

A few weeks ago I would have made the same statement but I started reading the PDF implementation docs and now I really like the format. 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 ve…

The share buttons and navigation chrome certainly can be put in a PDF, they're just incredibly uncommon. I've even played video games that were distributed as PDF files.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#22

Post by falcolas »

robert-zaremba wrote: post #9
rubidium wrote: post #5

PDF is beautiful. Long live PDF. I read a lot. I don't always want to read from a screen. Making PDF's available on the internet just saves me from having to search through a journal stack. PDF's have the advantange of the formatting looks good, and the author/publisher gets to choose how it looks. Usually with input from a professional. This is much better than the "styling" many websites and epubs provide.

that's the thing. 1) If you use simple HTML / EPUB majority of publications are good for printing. 2) Think about a relief of storing this documents on an ebook reader

> majority of publications are good for printing

This is a problem. PDF supports "all". Epub would have to have equivalent support, as well as native support in most/all vanilla OS distributions to be a real competitor for PDF.

> Think about a relief of storing this documents on an ebook reader

For many people this is their phone or tablet. Both of which support PDFs as well (as do many standalone ebook readers). You also don't have to get an extra app to view the PDFs.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#23

Post by mercer »

jrimbault wrote: post #16
noir_lord wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think robert-zaremba is talking about screen size ? Not screen resolution. IMO, reflowing text is big advantage if you're going for "portability accross screen sizes".

Indeed. I love my iPad Mini and I use it for pdf's quite regularly (GoodReader is great for this), but it's just a tad too small to comfortably read A4-size documents, even on a retina screen. For many eBooks this is fine, but scientific papers are usually A4 and can be hard to read and annotate.

In some cases this can be fixed by cutting the margins, but aside from a certain unpleasantness I feel reading an almost-marginless document, it's often still not enough to comfortably read.

So for the most part, whenever possible, I go for ePub documents using Marvin (also an excellent app), and I print the larger documents.

It's one of the main reasons I'm considering getting a normal-sized iPad though.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#24

Post by mercer »

klodolph wrote: post #21
guidoism wrote: post #18

A few weeks ago I would have made the same statement but I started reading the PDF implementation docs and now I really like the format. 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 ve…

The share buttons and navigation chrome certainly can be put in a PDF, they're just incredibly uncommon. I've even played video games that were distributed as PDF files.

Pdf games? Do you have an example you could send me, perhaps? I'm really curious.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#25

Post by robert-zaremba »

thinkMOAR wrote: post #20

Instead of calling for a 'ban' on a format by very much subjective reasons, how about calling for publication in multiple formats, so the people have a choice? It is certainly not much more work, and it looks in my humble opinion, professional.

Good point! Sorry if my Call sounds repulsive. Your idea with creating publications in multiple format works. I will update my post for that. Though, in my post, I want to highlight that usually simple solutions works fine. Most of this publications are not complex in terms of typesetting. If there is an objective for complex typesetting than fair enough.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#26

Post by jrimbault »

mercer wrote: post #23
jrimbault wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think robert-zaremba is talking about screen size ? Not screen resolution. IMO, reflowing text is big advantage if you're going for "portability accross screen sizes".

Indeed. I love my iPad Mini and I use it for pdf's quite regularly (GoodReader is great for this), but it's just a tad too small to comfortably read A4-size documents, even on a retina screen. For many eBooks this is fine, but scientific papers are usually A4 and can be hard to read and annotate. In some cases this can be fixed by cutting the margins, but aside from a certain unpleasantness I feel reading an almost-m…

I'm currently considering getting an iPad pro 12" for reading piano partitions. I'm sick of the stacks of large heavy old books laying on my piano and muffling the sound.

Does anyone here have a similar experience for that use case ? An iPad Pro seems large enough, but I don't really know. I've seen the Sony dpt-s2, but it seems very expensive given its limitations.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#27

Post by mercer »

ldjb wrote: post #19
emeraldd wrote: post #3

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.

Plain HTML isn't so good if you want to include images in your document or have multiple pages. You end up making the user download a whole bunch of files if they want a copy of the document. 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 curr…

Now that I think about it I'm kind of surprised that browser don't natively show EPUB files.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#28

Post by mohaine »

guidoism wrote: post #18

A few weeks ago I would have made the same statement but I started reading the PDF implementation docs and now I really like the format. 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 ve…

I think the format itself could be ok, but not in its current format.

The PDF header can be anywhere in the document. This makes parsing for bad content harder. (Also, you can have a valid pdf that is also a valid zip with the contents being the original file. How do you virus scan this?)

To many old image formats allowed, with readers only supporting a subset. Tiff alone has a bunch of options that are often broken. What happens when you put a multipage tiff in a pdf? (I think you just see the first page in Reader but some other reader might allow you browse them)

Lots of features in later versions that are not well supported. (forms, document libraries, scripting?)

It has been while since I left the document area but while I liked simple PDFs, once you say you support them, you have to support all of them which is almost impossible to do correctly. The later specs just have too many features that are almost unused but add a lot of complexity that really isn't needed in a portable document format. A stripped down/cleaned up version of the spec would be nice.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#29

Post by robert-zaremba »

jrimbault wrote: post #16
noir_lord wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think robert-zaremba is talking about screen size ? Not screen resolution. IMO, reflowing text is big advantage if you're going for "portability accross screen sizes".

yes, screen size.

Most of the people will agree with me that straining your eyes is not a good solution ;) Little letters are not comfortable neither healthy.

Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world

#30

Post by robert-zaremba »

mercer wrote: post #27
ldjb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain HTML isn't so good if you want to include images in your document or have multiple pages. You end up making the user download a whole bunch of files if they want a copy of the document. 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 curr…

Now that I think about it I'm kind of surprised that browser don't natively show EPUB files.

there are plugins for that (same as you have with PDFs, though you reuse same rwndering engine, since EPUBs are html documents under the hood)
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