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by gglitch 3283 days ago
I'm puzzled by this. I'm reading /Introducing Elixir, 2nd Edition/ online right now in Firefox on a Mac, and it looks fantastic. Beautifully formatted.
1 comments

I've just checked this book on Safari — it seems it indeed doesn't have the issues I've experienced while reading on Safari, like spacing between the letters in a word, tons of whitespace in weird places and poor image quality.

That means that overall quality of books ranges on the platform.

May I ask you, would you still prefer a Safari version of this book over, say, a PDF?

Tough call. I'm not at all unsympathetic to the variety of very good reasons why someone would prefer a pile of DRM-free files they own and can do with what they please. In this case, for me, it doesn't matter much; I have a Kindle on which I'd never try to read a technical book, so whether I read a pdf in Preview or a website in Firefox I'm kind of indifferent to. All else being equal, it seems to me that the web offers much more flexibility in design than a pdf, which must, at the end of the day, have standardized "pages," that don't necessarily correspond well semantically to the content.