Off topic: ebook formats

[Ross Eadie]

I know, my last post on this topic.  I was reading some of the material on
the www.baen.com web site and came across the following text which should
make you happy Patricia:

Expanding the available formats

We have no plans at present to expand the formats available, although we
are looking
into the question of whether some additions or changes might be helpful to
readers
who are blind or otherwise disabled.
If we make any changes or additions, that will be our top priority.
Since most of the questions around this involve PDF, I can say that we will
not be
adding a PDF format in the foreseeable future.
            The reason is as simple as it gets.
This Library is maintained through the good graces of Baen Books, which is
(for all
practical purposes) owned and operated by a man named Jim Baen. One of the
"perks"
of Jim's status is that he gets to make the final decisions.
  And Jim detests PDF.
            In his own words:
A few words on .PDF:
Adobe Acrobat ==>> pdf files. I don't know what all the perceived virtues
of Acrobat
are, except that supposedly it will suck Word and spit Word Perfect or
something.
Why I don't like it:
Acrobat allows you to design and print pages as if you were the editorial
staff of
Time Inc. complete with pictures and flowing text and captions in funny
types and
whatnot, just exactly the way the Publications Design Department wants. For
this
reason (I suppose) Design Depts just love it to pieces and flog it
everywhere, and
assume that everyone else will love it and its output too.
The thing is, it is not what you would call empowering to the end consumer.
What
it does, is generate files, .pdf files, that are extremely opaque to
standard word
processing software, so that if, for example, you downloaded Time's table
of contents,
you would be stuck with that appearance: no changes allowed, or possible.
Can't change
the margins, can't change font sizes, can't grab text for pasting, can't
anything.
Thus if we wanted to present a PDF file we would have to make every single
decision
that God intended for users to make for him (or her! or her! But I
digress...:).
Anyway, the text would have to be X wide, placed to the pixel just so with
an anchor
point
there
 on the screen when you look at it. Straight jacket city. Now me, I find
this anathematic.
Sometimes, when my sinuses are going, I don't much care about proportions
or whatever:
I want everything bigger than everything else, starting at 16 point
on-screen. I
want my text to be
whatever size I find comfortable!!!
But with PDF you cannot do that. What you see is what you... see. And for
some reason
the designers always use a font that might be called Ten Point Terminal
Myopic because
it will print nicely on paper. Of course if you want to just read it on a
screen,
too bad. Squint.
This is why we offer, at my insistence and in spite of my cohort's mild
negativity,
RTF files. Why? Well, bluntly because Word reads them. So do some other
word processing
progs, I'm told. This means that those word processors treat .RTF files as
native
, and you can do anything with them that your wp prog can do with its
files. Pick
fonts, pick margins, font-size, color, color background, space between
lines -- anything.
Now it seems to me that this is the way text should be offered: just
exactly the
way you want it. In a sense, you become a publisher when you read a Baen
e-file text.
---
Ross Eadie
Voice:  (204) 339-5287