[projectaon] Re: Do we need PDF editions of the books? If yes, why?

  • From: David Davis <feline1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 10:05:28 +0000

On balance, whilst the PDF format obviously excels at doing something like
exactly replicating a physical book layout, one section per page is
probably more useful for people reading it on a screen.
Another handy PDF feature are 'bookmarks', which most PDF readers can
display down a pane on the left-hand side. Usually they map to logical
headings in the document - if this includes section numbers, it will make
the PDF version quite nice to navigate

On 4 November 2014 22:44, Ingo Kloecker <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> [I reply to my own message, but I quote Jon's reply from the "Create A
> Font" thread because I want to keep the PDF discussion in this thread.]
>
> On Monday 03 November 2014 14:56:53 Jonathan Blake wrote:
> > This has been a helpful discussion for me. I agree, Ingo, that
> > publishing a format designed for printing makes very little sense.
> > I've got a reputation with my coworkers as the guy who never uses
> > paper. That's not wholly true, but there's almost never a single piece
> > of paper on my desk. What I'm saying is that someone printing out
> > their own books seems like something we don't necessarily want to
> > support.
> >
> > On the other hand, PDF is nearly ubiquitous in a way that EPUB and
> > other eBook formats are not, it would be a lot more convenient for
> > non-savvy readers who wanted to download the books for offline reading
> > than our current ZIP files, and it could showcase high-res versions
> > of the illustrations (assuming we can effectively vectorize them).
> >
> > I think the biggest barrier to implementation of PDF has been the
> > original desire to produce print-ready files with hand-corrected
> > pagination. If we relax that requirement and simply publish them the
> > way LaTeX generates them, would that remove our biggest obstacle?
>
> It would make publishing a bit easier, but the PDFs still need some
> love.
>
>
> > What are the technical obstacles?
>
> The main obstacle is setting everything up. But that needs to be done
> only once (unless an OS upgrade breaks something). Once the setup is
> done it's mostly a lot of little details that need to be done for every
> book, like replacing the images of the weapons and equipment with
> scalable images, rotating and positioning some of the large images
> (which originally have been two page images), optimizing the layout of
> the map, some page break optimization, illustration caption optimization
> (the hardcoded line breaks in the captions don't really work that good
> for the PDFs), etc.
>
>
> BTW, if we want to put the focus of the PDFs on offline reading rather
> than printing then we could think about using a different layout for the
> numbered sections. I had the idea to put each numbered section on a
> different page. This would make the look and feel of the PDFs more like
> the multi-page HTML version. This layout has the advantage that reading
> one numbered section does not spoil other numbered sections that also
> happen to be on the same page. This layout would also avoid most
> problems with suboptimal page breaks in the numbered section part of the
> books because most numbered sections are too short to be affected by a
> page break. OTOH, this layout would give the PDFs a very different look
> and feel than the actual books. Anyway, that was just an idea for the
> PDFs that crossed my mind. I'm not really sure whether it's a useful
> idea.
>
>
> Regards,
> Ingo
>
>
>
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