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

  • From: Ingo Kloecker <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 21:44:42 +0100

On Thursday 06 November 2014 10:05:28 David Davis wrote:
> 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

Yes, definitely. The current drafts sitting on my harddisk already have 
such a table of contents. I'll try to upload some of those drafts to my 
staff folder this weekend.


Regards,
Ingo


> 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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