jim said:

The problem with doing PDF "once" and "right" as I see it, is that there are more than one kind of customer for PDF files, each of which has very different idea of what doing it "right" means.

oh, look! jim has decided to show up again. welcome back, jim! and how astute of you, jim, to come to the conclusion to which i have been carefully leading you. that's a very clever strategy... you said "users just want to download a file and have it work". you said that they wouldn't want to do conversions themselves. and you said having .html as "master format" would enable that. but now you are admitting that, for .pdf users anyway, there is virtually no way you're going to be able to make good on your "download a file and have it work" philosophy, so you have _no_alternative_ but to have them do conversions themselves. the problem is that you haven't given them a tool to do that... so your advocacy of .html as a "master format" has _already_ run into some very big obstacles, which you cannot overcome. except you ain't big enough, jim, to actually say "i was wrong". instead, you couch it in terms of the flaws of the .pdf format. but we can see through that ruse, jim. thus i will continue to rub your nose in this little puddle of pee you have made here, until you learn that you need to do that kind of stuff _outside_.

And why are we even talking about say "8.5 x 11" ? Because PDF *IS* a paper descriptor format, it IS NOT an eBook Format.

don't keep saying idiotic things, jim, or i'll have to call you an idiot... nobody here is really talking about printing things out. even when carlo mentioned it in passing, it was only to say that people _can_ print out a half-sheet format to a full-size sheet of paper by just printing out the pages in a 2-up format, which is not a big deal... (you even twisted _that_, by trying to change it to a discussion of how someone would take 8.5*11 and _reduce_ it for 2-up printing.) but we are talking about people who _choose_ to read an e-book in the .pdf format. it's one of the most common choices out there. check at manybooks.com... or oreilly.com... or feedbooks.com... so even if _you_ want to sweep it under the rug, we won't _let_ you. besides, look at the very _topic_ of this thread -- ipads, and the huge number of them that were sold in just 9 months last year... it just so happens that, if you create a .pdf correctly, it will work _quite_nicely_ on an ipad. maybe better than any other format...

The next issue is should the PDF have margins or not and if so how wide.

blah blah blah. i've already made the point crystal-clear. it's impractical to create enough .pdf to cover all possibilities. so you're gonna have to give users a tool to do it themselves... just admit that _you_ cannot make good on your own suggestion to create a model where users just "download a book and read", so we can move on to the _next_ phase of your education, jim... because i'm not gonna let you wiggle out of this issue _again_, and have you show up here in another 15 months still spouting this same old nonsense. we're gonna end the issue _right_now_. -bowerbird