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 exists to produce PDFs identical to the print version, but no, we can't have those.
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.
Getting a passable PDF from an ePub is probably significantly easier than the reverse, so I'm all for having both, yes! (And please don't charge me twice for the privilege, publishers.)
Another problematic aspect is if one has poor eyesight and wishes to use a larger font size. One ends up having to scroll horizontally for each line of text for single column pages. For two-column pages, one has to scroll back a page after reading the first column.
Sometimes one can use a landscape-oriented display to avoid horizontal scrolling, but even if the same word count fits on the screen I seem to be annoyed by the low line count.
Providing large type and huge type PDFs would not entirely solve this problem as sometimes even one with poor eyesight might prefer a smaller font for scanning/skimming. Having to acquire two PDFs and switch between them based on mode of use seems suboptimal.
Fixed paged presentation has significant advantages for familiar reference material; some people seem to have a spatial memory that makes finding specific content by flipping pages faster than trying several search phrases (with the occasional benefit of serendipity).
Poetry often benefits from not reflowing lines and page breaking within a stanza is often more jarring than within a paragraph of prose. Yet a reader might prefer inferior typography over having to use a magnifying glass or carry a very large display.
One might be able to get some of the advantages of paged media for figures and tables by having header (or footer) pop-up links to such content when it is on the same "page" as the displayed text. This is not as low effort as moving one's eyes, but it might be better than inlined presentation on a small (relative to font size) display.
Even with print, there would be times when breaking the text to fit a figure is more disruptive than having the figure on a separate page. There would also be times when all the relevant figures would not fit on the same page as the related text.
Having a separate booklet of illustrations might make going back and forth between text and illustration easier, similar to having a lexicon or commentary open while reading. However, that also introduces position tracking in another book and other inconveniences.
Even when my vision was better, reading academic papers distributed as PDFs (usually 2-column) on a computer screen was less enjoyable than reading similar material in a reflowable format. Academic papers also do not seem to benefit as much from pagination as other writings.
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.)
Yes! This is what I keep complaining about! HTML likewise solved accessibility, but then it goes right through the cycle: someone extends it in a way that requires a special reader, then they focus on people with that reader at the expense of everyone else. Unless you stop the cycle from happening, going to a new format doesn't help!
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?
> Also: What did people screw up with HTML in your opinion?
The problem with PDFs is that you need to create multiple layouts to make them look good in print and on a variety of commonly used screen sizes; all those layouts is extra work. HTML, by its very nature, doesn't have this problem, and yet somehow today we still have to design multiple layouts to support print and common screen sizes. And in practice, we usually don't - instead, we design one layout optimized for mobile phones, and ignore how bad lit looks on desktop or in print. "Responsive web design" turned into forcing HTML to behave like a PDF, except using "iPhone" instead of "A4" as the size.
If you make your PDFs in A5, you can print two of them on an A4 paper and read the paper in landscape orientation. For the same reasons the size fits well for displaying on a computer screen and on a tablet/e-reader. It's still a bit too big to squeeze down to a cell phone, but at least better than A4/Letter size.
As for responsive HTML, it's the responsibility of the designer to make it work if he/she is worth their salt. Like you say, HTML without CSS is already responsive. If businesses understood that there are a big segment of customers who will always use their computer and never their phone when it's time to make a purchase, perhaps they'd be better at it.
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).
Probably also column layout. 2-column documents are fine for A4 sizes, but terrible for A6 or most e-reader screen sizes. Scroll down, then up & across, then down, then across, then repeat. Versus just scroll down or just turn pages.
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.
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.
The more I think about it, the more I'm getting convinced that A4/Letter was a mistake. Maybe we'll see something like A5 as a standard in the future, that would be neat.
Part of this is that books and screens are not interchangeable pieces of technology. Books are still supreme when it comes to reference material and lookup speed but each page needs static typesetting. Screens are more fragile, expensive, generally smaller, with lower contrast and/or resolution, but they allow a fully flexible display with variable font sizes, the ability to scroll half way between pages etc. A PDF on a screen is all of the downsides of books with none of the upsides of screens.
I agree, I absolutely hate reading basically everything other than novels/non-fiction narratives in epub. All the work they did laying out the pages is just thrown away! Trying to read any sort of instructional book as an epub is straight up infuriating.
I work for a children's reading platform, and the book publishers universally send us PDFs of everything. We have a bespoke system to convert the PDFs into SVG for higher flexibility and added interactivity.
Literal Kids board books are getting a better treatment!
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.
