| 1a. .pdf is a fine format. 1b. unless -- as is increasingly the case these days -- you're reading it on a screen smaller than the one for which the .pdf was designed, in which case .pdf is an awful format. 2a. .epub is a fine format. 2b. unless you're reading it in a viewer-app which is wonky, which most of them are. (the inconsistencies of rendering with this so-called "standard" are unbelievably bad, and seem to be getting worse rather than better as time goes on.) 3a. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of a .pdf, you often get some really bad stuff that loses a lot of important styling. 3b. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of an .epub, it's not much better. 4a. the standard line is that an .epub is just "a website packaged into a .zip file", implying that anything you can do on a website can be done in an .epub. 4b. the standard line is a lie. an .epub requires .xhtml rather than .html, and a complex mess of associated files, and most .epub viewer-apps have trouble supporting the full gamut of .css, and also do not allow you to use javascript at all. conclusion: the state of sharing documents on the web in a way that allows offline use while enabling the convenient re-use of text is a sad state indeed. |