[phaus]

He's talking about it from the perspective of a user of an ebook reading app. He might not know what the problem is. The point is he shouldn't have to know or care what the technical issue is. He's trying to read a paper and when he reads an epub version it usually looks like shit.

This is a usability issue. It might be possible to make properly formatted epubs. However, from his experience most authors aren't making properly formatted epubs, so using epub isn't an option for him.

I've experienced the same quality issue with Epubs. It has been probably 5 years since I've tried reading one, so maybe they have gotten better. Can you give an example of a freely available Epub with proper image placement?

I think part of the issue is that people subconsciously expect ebooks to look like they would expect print books to look. That's not all nostalgia. One of the reasons print books are formatted the way they are is because over centuries of tweaking designs people figured out a near optimal way to present a combination of images and text. You could create print books that mimic the look of the average reflowed EPUB text, but it would look terrible because it doesn't benefit from having an intelligently designed layout.

[aasasd]

> Can you give an example of a freely available Epub with proper image placement?

My telepathy isn't so good today, so I'm still not getting the signal on what ‘proper’ means here, and thus the example isn't coming. Maybe tomorrow, I guess, if the chakras clean up or something.

[mattkrause]

Functional and aesthetically pleasing? It's one of those "you'll know it when you see it" things, but grab any decently typeset book or paper.

The illustrations, diagrams, and tables are the right size and shape to ensure the details are legible, without wasting a ton of space. They are placed at pertinent locations in the text, usually near the first or major mention of related topic. There's a nice boundary between the text and illustration, so you can tell which is which (again, without wasting a ton of space). If there are multiple illustrations, they're laid out in a sensible way so that one or two lines of text don't appear--and get lost--between them.

[aasasd]

I was hoping to see an example that is a problem for HTML. What you list, I see on most decent websites—and these features depend on the author and designer's sense, not on the possibilities of PDF. In fact, I encounter more issues when people are trying to be too clever, e.g. by floating images to sides; and no issues when images are kept like paragraphs of text, in the main flow—the one which is reformatted to the screens of different devices.

The most difficult of your criteria is ‘the right size’, mostly because of varying screen dimensions and viewing distances. It's not a problem on desktop, though, and having this issue on a phone is possible only because HTML is reflowable to the screen size in the first place. Moreover, HTML can do things that are verboten and unthinkable in PDF: having an individual image zoomed in and panned without the rest of the page moving away (most sites stop at screen-size ‘lightboxes’ so far, but I'm thinking of slapping together an extension that would instead do the full zoom-around thing on any page).

Overall, it sounds like the same old tradeoff of whether you want to do glamour-magazine-style fancy hijinks with your images, or you want to be able to read the documents on smaller screens and devices. And I know which one I choose.

[mattkrause]

You're thinking about this too technically.

As an engineer, I am totally willing to believe that the EPub format itself is capable of producing gorgeous, reflowable documents that would knock Edward Tufte's socks off with their design. As a reader though, I've also been disappointed. I don't really care that a book could have been authored better. I want nicely rendered math and I don't want random

line brea

ks

and other ug-li-ness that makes me squint and scroll.

One reliable way to avoid that is to just get a PDF instead. This may be a historical accident. The PDF formatting is probably closer to the print layout, which is most publishers' core competency. Maybe the tools are better, or the layout staff are just better trained on them. Maybe it's the reader, rather than the document. Regardless, I'm going to be reading it on something paper-shaped (and often, sized) so it's barely even a tradeoff.

[aasasd]

I'm thinking technically because I want PDF out and HTML/epub in. If authors or publishers have trouble with producing HTML/epub, I'd like to hear about that too. Ironically, when I had surprises with amateur-made epubs of e.g. SICP, alternative releases in actual HTML were better.

(Btw, I'm told that PDFs of Tufte suck and the only way to read him is on paper.)

> I'm going to be reading it on something paper-shaped (and often, sized) so it's barely even a tradeoff

Just as I wrote at the beginning of the thread: “buy a special device to read this format”.

[phaus]

You're clearly either not interested in or not capable of taking part in a conversation where you aren't needlessly condescending so tomorrow you can save yourself the effort.