[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”.