Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
> 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.
I've never met any compact pdfs. pdf's suck at rendering text documents,
like a book of fiction. They're the universal all-things-to-all-people
file, and as such perform certain common, but restricted tasks very badly.
>> 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.
It's not pure xml, but it is one of the descendants of sgml, like xml. I
believe it's closest to a subset of html. It's not particularly compact
in and of itself, but it compresses really well. Vendors (like
Fictionwise) can keep one set of master files and spit out any format
you want, if the book publisher allows it.
Mobipocket and PalmReader files tend to be almost as good as a zip
compressed txt file. Good old MS managed to bloat the .lit format with a
bunch of overhead, so it's a few hundred kilobytes larger in the most
common sizes. That being said, MS also did a good design job, and the MS
Reader implementation, bugs and all, is a very pleasant tool. I tend to
use Microbook, since it covers a wide range of formats.
In any case, since Mr. Sigler or his publisher put up a roadblock to my
sampling his story, in the form of a non-tagged pdf, I'll probably never
know if he's any good.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
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