got a new iphone very recently (yay verizon!). i had waited two-and-a-half years to update, because i didn't want to renew an at&t contract. so, as you would suspect, my new phone is a lot faster than my old one was... (it was a plain 3g, not even a 3gs, so the speed difference was big.) so i'm now doing more things with the iphone than i had been doing before. including e-mail. (thus, this listserve.) and clicking on .pdf links. the .pdf viewer in the old iphone was very slow, which is why i'd never gotten into that habit, but with the new iphone, the process is not painful... so i opened some of the .pdfs i've been creating, and reminded myself that an 8-inch-high page is just a smidgen too big for the safari .pdf-app. so i'm gonna be reducing that default to 7 inches, or somewhere around that, depending on results. *** i also got an ipad. (the cheapest model available, since the newer version will be here pretty soon.) so i'll be playing around with that as well. these fixed-width units will soon be very popular. (that's an understatement, intended to be funny.) and they give new life to a fixed-pagesize format like .pdf, even though i wanted it dead years ago. as far as i can tell, if you can customize the .pdf to your specific preferences, it'll work very nicely on an iphone or an ipad, maybe better than .epub, since there's a lot in .epub you cannot customize when displayed in the default ibooks viewer-app. i'll know more after some experimentation. but if anyone has any experience themselves, i'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions... -bowerbird
On Friday, 25th February 2011 at 14:06:57 (GMT -0500 EST), Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
so i'm now doing more things with the iphone than i had been doing before. including e-mail. (thus, this listserve.)
Great! So you can now clearly appreciate how ugly all those convoluted HTML emails with excessive mark-up are, that you've been sending to this list for years, right? And, you can feel the pain when you see on your iPhone and iPad how every single message from you to this list breaks the proper threading of discussions, right? Thanks a lot in advance, Bowerbird, for switching to plain-text and away from inferior email software at long last. :-)
so i opened some of the .pdfs i've been creating,
I'm mystified as to why you're focusing on PDFs as the first thing. Isn't the soundest principle of any and all business to *do first things first*? PDFs are of marginal importance in the world of e-books; PDFs are eminently unfit for e-books, and when Michael Hart said in a recent post he was unclear as to why there are so many PDF downloads of e-books... I know the answer, and I have mentioned it in my foregoing message: the only reason people download or create e-books in PDF is the people's *ignorance* of more appropriate formats for e-books, such as EPUB, MOBI, or even HTML. And the reason for their ignorance is only the ubiquitous nature of PDFs on the Internet. PDF gets massively misused on the Internet. Many webpages publish content in PDFs that should have been published in HTML or in other, more accessible formats instead. On the harmful nature of PDF, see Jakob Nielsen's classic essay, "PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption" http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html So my question for Bowerbird is: why on earth would you focus on the nuisance known as PDF, as the *first* of all formats? Surely, the creator of a converter should *first* deal with formats such as EPUB, or MOBI, or HTML to ensure that all these formats, far more suitable for e-books than PDF, are fully supported by the converter.
these fixed-width units will soon be very popular.
??? Pardon me? There is nothing whatsoever that is "fixed-width" about the iPad, iPhone, or Kindle. That's because you can read e-books on those devices both in portrait orientation, and in landscape orientation, frequently switching between the two. For example, when I do "field work", I read e-books on my iPhone in portrait orientation. But when I read while I'm having lunch, my iPhone is supported by a kickstand and shows all texts in landscape orientation. Therefore, there's nothing at all about the iPhone, iPad, or Kindle that supports the idea of "fixed width". Quite on the contrary: it's the *free-flowing* text formats such as EPUB and MOBI that get a big boost from the increasing usage of such devices.
and they give new life to a fixed-pagesize format like .pdf, even though i wanted it dead years ago.
No, quite on the contrary: they are the final "kiss of death" for PDF. I do trust that the emergence of the iPad, Kindles, etc., will soon send PDFs to their grave -- in the context of e-books. The only 2 proper usages for PDFs are: a) to ensure optimized printing of content on all platforms (but hardly anyone would want to print an e-book nowadays); b) capturing the photographic image of something (irrelevant for text-based e-books).
since there's a lot in .epub you cannot customize when displayed in the default ibooks viewer-app.
The "default ibooks viewer-app" sucks, and anyone familiar with iOS knows that the supreme reading application for iOS is Stanza -- not iBooks, and not the Kindle app either. Both iBooks and the Kindle app are woefully inadequate compared to Stanza -- and I assure you that Stanza gives you all the customization options that you'll ever need, including, crucially, the ability to display white text on a dark background -- something that is shockingly missing both from iBooks and the Kindle app. (While it is proven that white-on-dark, especially *after it gets dark* in your reading environment, strains your eyes far less than reading "black-on-white", which amouts to staring at a giant shining slate of white colour while trying to decipher tiny dark-coloured letters. That kind of a thing will soon tire anyone's eyes. I always read my e-books on the Kindles in daytime, and on the iPad after it gets dark. Note: switching to "inverse mode" in iBooks or the Kindle app is no solution, due to the delicate serif fonts used in those apps -- not visible enough when viewed white-on-black. In contrast, if you choose a font like Futura in Stanza, this makes reading white-on-black, in a dark environment, extremely comfortable and soothing for the reader's eyes.) In fact, the Kindle and iBooks apps are so inadequate, that even those books that I have purchased from Amazon, I convert from AZW to EPUB (after stipping DRM from them using the superb DeDrm utility), so that I can enjoy reading Amazon books, too, in Stanza on my iPad and iPhone. -- Yours, Alex. www.aboq.org [processed by "The Bat!", Version 4.2.10.12]
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