04-16-2008, 08:27 AM | #16 |
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I could deal with unencrypted PDFs but there are so many technical books that are only available in DRMed PDF. Since there are no eInk readers that support PDFs with DRM and reading them on a TX is ridiculous so I have to buy the dead tree version. One of the big reasons I want to move completely to ebooks is to get rid of my dead tree technical library but as it stands with encrypted PDFs and the inability to read them on anything but a PC, it's not going to happen.
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04-16-2008, 10:09 AM | #17 | |
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Third party readers don't support it because they aren't really committed to PDF. It is just a checkmark in the list of features. Another problem is the horsepower available on E-INK readers is less than half the power available on PPC devices. Adobe did a version of PDF reader for Palm but there was not enough horsepower on the Palm so they did the reflow on the PC and then downloaded a results file when made it non-standard. Mobipocket does a similar thing with their PDF to .prc converter that is built into their Windows Reader product. Current Palms have enough horsepower and the only 3rd party reflowable product in existence is now a free download for Palm devices. It is called PalmPDF I believe. Supposedly Adobe and Sony are working on a version for the PRS505 but at the consumer electronic show it was shown only doing PDF text files that had no images. Dale |
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04-16-2008, 10:38 AM | #18 | |||
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Since only the latest version of Acrobat (for Windows) supports it, reflowable support hasn't been around for "years".
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Now, it could be OpenOffice's PDF creation software isn't working quite right, but it's all I have to go by since tagged PDFs are rather rare in the wild. Quote:
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Tried PalmPDF. Useless for reading PDFs unless the PDF is formatted for the Palm. PalmPDF is based on xpdf and, at least the version I tried, did not support reflow. |
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04-16-2008, 10:53 AM | #19 | |||
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Dale |
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04-16-2008, 11:32 AM | #20 | |
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04-16-2008, 11:55 AM | #21 | |
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At the time, I bought a few PDF books to see how well they worked on PDAs and they reflowed just fine on both the Palm & the Pocket PC, with no additional effort from me. I could not have modified anything in these books any way since they are encrypted with DRM. If you review the document properties of the PDF files you come across "in the wild" you might be surprised to discover that more of them are tagged than you think. The PDF format is quite versatile and perhaps that versatility leads many to believe it is not suitable for eBooks. Many people create print images of books, magazines and articles and call their creation ebooks. Furthermore, the developers of electronic book readers perpetuate this myth, either purposefully or not, by designing software that does not capitalize on a PDF eBooks tags and by not allowing these books to reflow to fit the device screen. Most of the alternative PDF software, when compared option-by-option to Adobe Acrobat, is quite inferior. That is not Adobe's fault! These alternative PDF applications generally only offer the more popular options and don't come close to giving you everything you get with Adobe Acrobat (in that regard, you really do get what you pay for). Even so, why blame the PDF format for this lack of understanding, lack of commitment, and lack of features of alternative PDF applications? |
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04-16-2008, 11:59 AM | #22 | |
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04-16-2008, 12:02 PM | #23 | |
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04-16-2008, 12:26 PM | #24 | |||
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In the tests that I did with OpenOffice.org, the tagged PDF and the non-tagged PDF displayed the same. The only difference was the file size. |
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04-16-2008, 12:40 PM | #25 | |
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04-16-2008, 12:42 PM | #26 | |
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Yes, and no. Adobe makes a program (that only runs on closed, proprietary systems) that takes a PDF, reformats it into something even more useless and unreadable, and puts it into a Palm file. Then they wrote a program that runs on the Palm that can read this useless file.
Run Adobe's free reader on the Palm, then try to open a PDF you've put on your SD card. It won't work. Quote:
I don't. I blame PDF for being a locked down, bloated format. |
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04-16-2008, 04:24 PM | #27 |
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Here's an entry from a blog on Adobe.com that freely admits the points I was trying to make in the opening post.
http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/200...uthor_ebo.html BOb |
04-16-2008, 04:30 PM | #28 | ||
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I don't think the PDF format is any more locked down than any other format. It may be bloated, but file size does not concern me that much, there are always storage cards that I can use to store my files, so I don't feel such a big need to conserve space. To speak to an earlier point about how much larger tagged files are versus untagged files, I performed a test. I took a large PDF book that was untagged and ran Adobe Acrobat's tag option on it. The file size changed from 39,188 KB to 40,646 KB. I don't see this as a significant difference, do you? |
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04-16-2008, 04:35 PM | #29 | |
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The PDF format has been around for a very long time. It has changed (more features introduced) over time to address new uses. How can Adobe be blamed if third parties are not stimulated to write applications to use these features? We, as consumers, have quite a lot of power, don't you think? If we press the developers of these devices to give us this functionality, do you think they will be motivated then? Before this thread, many of the readers here probably didn't even know that PDF files could be used on the current batch of ebook reader devices if only the developers would add the functionality to their respective PDF reader software..... |
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04-16-2008, 06:19 PM | #30 | |||
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So starting with the original file:
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It's not a space issue. It's a speed issue. It's simply going to take an eBook reader 4 times longer to load a tagged PDF than a Mobipocket file. Based on my experiments, it takes far longer to turn the page in a PDF than an HTML/Mobipocket eBook (at least on my Cybook and iLiad). |
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