Re: Scott Sigler's Infected

Jack Tingle <wjtingle@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:

> Mike Schilling wrote:
>
>> And to postscript, which seems ideal for the purpose of displaying
>> non-interactive stuff on a screen: highly expressive, reasonably
>> compact, extremely well-documented, lots of prgramming expertise
>> available.   No douct there are excellent reasons that all of the
>> e-readers invented their own proprietary format instead. 
>
> Um, I hate to tell you this, but both pdf and ps are space-hogs that
> take up twice as much space as the competition. Both formats were
> intended for publishing to paper across a wide variety of printers,
> not for human reading on a screen. They're terrible at displaying on
> varying screen sizes, and both are dominated by a single company
> (Adobe) that has trouble playing well with others. They're also slow
> to render.

Ummm....  that's too broad a brush.  PDF can be very compact, if the
generator takes advantage of the streams.  The quality of the display
at various resolutions is a function of the quality of the fonts and
the rendering engine.  What PDF is good at is representing documents
very completely -- whether for display or on a printer.  Finally, over
in the Linux world, free readers are vastly more popular than Adobe's
own.

> Most other e-book formats have a common underlying format structure
> governed by an industry standard group. It's a variant of sgml, html,
> xml, etc. It produces a fairly compact file that reads well across
> platforms. There are a couple of rogues, but Kindle, Mobipocket, MS
> Lit, and (I think) Sony, all use the same structure, and just put
> their own compression and DRM wrapper over it. Kindle and Mobi
> actually just use different encryption keys for the two versions of
> the same file.

A variant of xml that's compact?  That seems really unlikely.