Re: Scott Sigler's Infected

In the Year of the Earth Rat, the Great and Powerful Joe Pfeiffer 
declared:
> Jack Tingle <wjtingle@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> 
>> 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. 

The problem isn't the resolution. It's that you can't reformat the 
text for optimal use of screen real estate. On a widescreen monitor, 
if I zoom in so the text takes up the width of the screen, I only 
get seven or eight lines and have to scroll constantly; if I zoom 
out so I can see a decent chunk of text, it leaves huge, blank margins.

YBook is the ideal implementation for reading books on a computer -- 
it wraps the text into two columns, so I don't have to swivel my 
neck back and forth for each line, and I only have to hit a button 
when I finish both columns.

-- 
Sean O'Hara <http://diogenes-sinope.blogspot.com>
I like all my human interactions to involve shotguns.
    -Molly Wood