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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

> What was the matter with PDF?

In a word, reflow.

Actually that's sort of the problem. Reflow can fucking destroy technical texts.

Epub apparently supports fixed-layout content (or so says wikipedia). I don't know if I've ever seen it done (although I haven't read many technical epubs).

Fixed-layout is supported via EPUB, but you need a reader that knows how to display the fixed-layout version. 99% of readers only display reflowable content.

What you really want to do is go with reflowable content that is formatted correctly (proper HTML/CSS), and if the content breaks across the page, changing the font size should help rectify.

(spoken from too many years of ebook + tech book experience)

An understatement of the century. In 21st century, PDF is not suitable for mobile devices.

I've read ebooks (ePUB) on my Nexus 7, but it's only usable for serious reading because I can increase the fonts without having horizontal scrolling (in vertical orientation). Without this, I'd probably need an e-paper based reader but even that might unusable for typical A4/letter formatted PDFs.

True, but you can get reflow with a better format than whatever the Kindle is using. ePub comes to mind.

While I can't speak about the native Amazon files, I know that the kindlegen use html under the hood. It outputs (at least the versions I've used) a mobi file, which is just a zip container with some metadata. Inside, you'll find html files. I'm reasonably certain that the native Amazon stuff is just another layer ontop of that.

Perhaps the difficulties Tim is talking about are really renderer shortcomings and not the format itself, which I had assumed was a lot more restrictive than HTML.

The problem (mostly) isn't the renderer, it's the content. It does actually need to be a reasonably reflowable html page, as opposed to too many manual line breaks, excessively indented blocks, etc.

For code, that's just not easy.

I wonder if the problem is specific to whatever algorithm Amazon is using. I've never tried to read a technical book on a Kindle, but on both my Nook and my iPad ePub files work far better than PDFs.

Lines in code samples do have to get wrapped fairly often on the Nook, but it's done in a sensible manner and there's a nice text editor style arrow icon to indicate which lines were wrapped.

The whole point of PDF is that it doesn't have reflow.

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