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Comment by SilentM68 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I dislike about PDFs is that dark themes usually don't render good, especially the embedded images, whereas the EPUB format seems to render them just fine. If a new EPUB format is created, I would suggest that they support pagination, since post secondary courses usually ask students to site chapters, pages, etc. Most EPUBs that I've come across don't have pages. The last thing I'd suggest is that the new standard, if created, should incorporated accessibility features, so that the file is readable by screen readers. PDFs are rarely designed with accessibility in mind. Making them accessible is also a gigantic pain to do. The technology behind any new EPUB document standard should have native accessibility support by default. People with print disabilities will thank you.

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> If a new EPUB format is created, I would suggest that they support pagination, since post secondary courses usually ask students to site chapters, pages, etc. Most EPUBs that I've come across don't have pages.

From the post:

> I think we just have to give up on citing content by pages. Instead, we should mandate a consistent numbering scheme for block elements within a document, and have people cite using that scheme.

The point of a citation is to specifically reference an assertion. Any method of specifically referencing an assertion works.

If anything, referencing by section and paragraph is more portable than referencing by page number. It's more consistent across different print formats of the same text (hardcover vs. paperback, and mainstream print editions vs. large-text or braille editions) as well as different digital formats.

this is an issue in the legal world. court opinions accessed only online are cited according to their “page number” in some reporter or another. it’s better to cite paragraph numbers when possible but most American legal documents are un-numbered.

It sounds like the legal world can continue to use PDFs. That's fine!

Laws already have problems with HTML: numbered lists are specified in a way which is incompatible with many jurisdiction's numbering schemes, including the US Federal standard.

> dark themes usually don't render good

PDFs should not render dark themes at all. PDFs should like exactly like they were produced. So if they were produced with black on white text, that's what they should render, in any circumstance.

Zathura[0] has a dark mode[1], it works pretty well.

[0]: https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/

[1]: ^r Recolor (grayscale and invert colors)

Or it can just invert the L component of all colors in the HSL colorspace at the very last stage of rendering, which only requires a couple subtractions to do in sRGB.

Unlike the unfortunately common "invert directly in sRGB", this preserves the colors changing only the brightness, and honestly it's pretty good. Colorspace nerds will no doubt complain that there are better colorspaces available, but in practice, most consumer devices implement "sRGB" perceptually such that this works better than fancier methods (which only work for carefully calibrated displays in carefully calibrated rooms).

I didn’t say PDF cannot do it, I said it should not. It defeats the purpose of PDF.

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