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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)

#71

Post by ileonichwiesz »

carlosjobim wrote: post #66
Tepix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's the opposite. Whenever i have the choice, i want EPUB, not PDF. The problem with PDFs is that you don't have a device that is the same size as the original page size in most cases.

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)?

Surely the only difference between an A4 PDF and an A6 one would be text size?

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

#72

Post by rjmunro »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
jll29 wrote: post #20

Not to mention the ugly/unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust. Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it's automated by people who lack the specialized knowledge, or for whom it is not a priority (quarter century old bug reports, really?) suggests that in 2025, you should still avoid ebooks if you care about quality and aesthetics. This is a shame beca…

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

JPEG is the absolute worst possible solution here. If MathML or similar is not supported, use an SVG or PDF so that it's zoomable and not made of pixels. It's also slightly readable by screen readers (although you probably want some sort of alt-text for those anyway).

If no vector formats are supported, use PNG, or another "lossless" format not JPEG. JPEG's compression is designed for photos where the probability of 2 neighbouring pixels being the same is tiny. Note that PNG doesn't have to be lossless - if you want to shrink the file size you can reduce the resolution or the colour space.

Even GIF is a much better choice than JPEG for a diagram, mathematical formula or logo with hard edges and a small number of colours. SVG is usually the right choice, (but don't do what one designer did for me and embed a JPEG in an SVG instead of giving me an SVG direct from Illustrator or Inkscape).

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

#73

Post by carlosjobim »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #71
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)?

Surely the only difference between an A4 PDF and an A6 one would be text size?

Yes, exactly. That's what matters.

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

#74

Post by dagw »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #71
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)?

Surely the only difference between an A4 PDF and an A6 one would be text size?

Depends which parameter you choose to hold fixed. You could shrink your text and keep the layout and page count or keep your text size fixed and increase the page count. If people were doing layout for a fixed A5 or A6 size they will probably make many different choices compared to laying out for A4.

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

#75

Post by rjmunro »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #71
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)?

Surely the only difference between an A4 PDF and an A6 one would be text size?

I think the point is that if you are designing with that size in mind you may make different decisions about the column layout etc.

I would have thought that a PDF of a book would normally be made in the size of the physical book, which could be A4, but usually isn't (at least not when I look at my bookshelves).

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

#76

Post by p_l »

n_plus_1_acc wrote: post #19
acabal wrote: post #5

If you think it's bad that `break-*` isn't supported in Firefox or Chrome, wait till you see what your ebook looks like in Kindle, or worse, ADE-based readers, of which there are still many in use! Kindle, the reading device with by far the largest market share, is basically the IE6 of ereaders - too big to ignore, and at the same time dragging down the entire ebook ecosystem with its crappy renderer. Amazon has show…

Is there a caniuse for ebook readers?

As long as you want wide support on Kindles, you're pretty much stuck on Mobi.

Which was great when it came out, but is comparable to HTML 2.0 era.

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

#77

Post by p_l »

willvarfar wrote: post #53
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.

Do you mean they can be created for any page size, or do you mean they sensibly resize when you change page size?

A properly prepared PDF will scale "perfectly" (FSVO - needs all drawings in vector form) as long as you keep the aspect ratio the same.

The problem is changes in aspect ratio or wanting to reflow text to have larger font when rendering to small screen.

Not sure if it's doable to generate flexible enough rendering commands in PDF. Was doable in PostScript (again, FSVO) but PDF was explicitly made to be decidable and less turing complete.

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

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

carlosjobim wrote: post #66
Tepix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's the opposite. Whenever i have the choice, i want EPUB, not PDF. The problem with PDFs is that you don't have a device that is the same size as the original page size in most cases.

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)?

Adapting PDFs for devices won't save us. HTML, being designed around reflow, had the ultimate solution from day one - and yet we've managed to screw that up so badly it spawned a whole industry sub-specialty of "responsive design". When authors start producing multiple PDF versions for different devices and print, how long until someone gets tired of "extra work" and comes up with "responsive PDFs"?

(Also I feel that by default, non-book PDFs tend to show up in the US "Letter" size, which looks deceptively similar to A4, until you try to print it.)

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

#79

Post by carlosjobim »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78
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)?

Adapting PDFs for devices won't save us. HTML, being designed around reflow, had the ultimate solution from day one - and yet we've managed to screw that up so badly it spawned a whole industry sub-specialty of "responsive design". When authors start producing multiple PDF versions for different devices and print, how long until someone gets tired of "extra work" and comes up with "responsive PDFs"? (Also I feel that…

Like you mention, HTML already exists for adaptive text reflow. I assume that people making PDFs want their layouts fixed. But maybe an A5 format would make more sense, even if you're printing it?

Also: What did people screw up with HTML in your opinion?

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

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

nosianu wrote: post #64
WalterBright wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my tablet I can use two fingers to zoom. But I pretty much never need to do that with a full size tablet. That's why I bought one with the retina display.

But zooming scales the fonts only. For pixel images you have the pixels that are in it and that's it. Scaling those either up or down does not produce good text. Now I'm just waiting for the inevitable "AI image scaler" that handles text inside images.

> Now I'm just waiting for the inevitable "AI image scaler" that handles text inside images.

I'm surprised this isn't a thing already, as it seems doable with what people called "AI" 20 years ago. I mean, unless some unusual/non-default font was used, upscaling text on an image should be almost trivial. Ligatures notwithstanding, "printed letters" have a fixed shape, so:

1. Identify the typeface, size, weight, etc. by looking at the pixels of the text;

2. OCR the text (which should be 100% reliable);

3. Blank out the original text pixels; re-render the content (from step 2.) at a larger size (using parameters from step 1.).

I'm hedging here; it feels to me that OCR-ing normal text that never left the digital realm should be 100% reliable, but I'm not a specialist in that subfield so I surely must be missing something...

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