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Comment by fivea | Hacker News Reader

> Ironically, I wish they would publish it as HTML broken down by chapter and section.

I wish there was an EPUB version of the document. Do PDFs support reflowable content?

I believe one of the selling points of PDFs was the absolute lack of reflowing content.

Right, as the point is to represent a physical document, paper and ink (or canvas, toner, whatever -- stuff that doesn't reflow).

Why anyone would use such a format for these situations, where the audience definitely cares way more about consuming it on an electronic device than printing it out, is... mind-boggling.

Of course, AI+ML to the rescue: Liquid Mode [0].

> Files are processed in our secure data servers and immediately deleted from our servers after the experience is generated.

[0] https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobat/android/en/lmode.h...

I've found people being precise about the flow of equations and text intermixed can be easier to read than reflowing content. Other than that, not so much.

Edit: Non-reflowing content also works well if you need to refer people to page numbers and paragraphs.

I look forward to playing with liquidmode at some point soon.

CSS flow control and specifying an `id` attribute value as a URL fragment would be my solutions to those particular concerns, if it weren't the case that our context here is capturing from software that offers printing but doesn't offer exporting to HTML very well. I think the solution might be "bring it to a good web dev and have a solid punch list."

A PDF can be reflowed without reconstructive processing only if a PDF was generated as a Tagged PDF [1] and if the viewer supports reflowing.

[1]: Essentially a PDF with its own EPUB inside it, but unlike just having an attached EPUB, there is a map between the page layout of the PDF and the tags.

There are implementations of reconstructive reflowing that infer the layout block structure and reading order and can reflow a two column paper into a single column.

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