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Comment by goggles99 | Hacker News Reader

>For many years I've resisted temptations to put out a hasty electronic version of The Art of Computer Programming, because the samples sent to me were not well made

Not well made? It's a book that is a PDF at some point before it hits printing presses. What is there to make at all? The kindle has been out for how many years? how is the book so different when reading it on an e-ink display? He mentions that shortcuts were added, but still - how is it worse than a printed book (there are no links there either).

This seems disingenuous.

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PDFs and ebook readers are not a good mix. PDFs are designed to look the same on every device and on paper, and that doesn't work well when you've got bigger and smaller readers. A well-made ebook—something that's been made as an ebook—reflows well regardless of the form factor of the device (and there are many).

Also, most devices have zoom/text size capability, and PDFs don't play nicely with that, nor do they really work well with image placement on screen. When you bear in mind that a weighty technical tome like TAoCP has lots of equations, and equations use lots if images, it all gets pretty ugly when you're stuck with a fixed-form PDF.

I'm sure Knuth will be glad to know any customer can purchase TAoCP from Pearson/InformIT in any electronic format that he wants so long as it is PDF.

Additionally, Pearson/InformIT have chosen to enhance the layout of each page by discreetly reminding the reader of their full name.

> PDFs and ebook readers are not a good mix. I beg to differ. Maybe PDFs and small-screen eInk readers are not a good mix.

For anything technical (computer science/maths) I only buy an eBook if there's a PDF version available (a PDF that looks like the print edition). I've had nothing but bad experience with reflowable formats such as EPUB with technical books. Equations and graphs are stored as low resolution images, any complex layout (floats for example) has to be turned into a strictly linear flow, etc... A vector PDF, on the other hand, is infinitely scalable, so you can zoom in on graphs and equations without any loss of quality.

Still, all those arguments are moot, since the book released now is just a PDF.

Probably best not to argue with Donald Knuth about typesetting.

Well, an ebook experience is about much, much more than just typesetting. (See eg some comments in this discussion.)

Disingenuous? Maybe you're unaware of why Knuth invented TeX in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History.

It sounds to me like Knuth wanted something that wasn't just a straight up text dump of his book. If you're going to bother exporting your book to an interactive format, it makes sense to do it in such a way that it takes advantage of that format.

Someone has not read many mathematical books on a Kindle (or even PDFs on an iPad), let alone seen the intricate typesetting of TAoCP. For an epub the configurable font size alone wreaks havoc with mathematical typesetting, and converting them to pixelated versions fails as screen resolutions go to higher and higher DPI.

It's a monster of a problem, which still isn't solved. As good as TeX/LaTeX is at handling paper sizes, the screen sizes / DPIs / pagination / font sizes of eReaders is a far more difficult platform to target.

Why is it disingenuous? Have you looked into the complexities of eBooks?

You have to not only figure out what format to release in, but also deal with various screen formats and linkages.

Sure you can release a version of the master file relying on the software's search feature and make your user deal with the formatting, but it will look bad in nearly every setting.

Note that this is especially true of ebooks which don't have responsive displays and need to be formated for to display as you would expect. You cannot simply throw a PDF with arbitrary dimensions and get good results.

>You cannot simply throw a PDF with arbitrary dimensions and get good results.

Yet, that is exactly what they did.

That's why it's disingenuous.

Wait, what? Well nevermind then, that sucks.

> It's a book that is a PDF at some point before it hits printing presses. What is there to make at all? The kindle has been out for how many years? how is the book so different when reading it on an e-ink display?

Just anecdotal information : my Kindle regularly reports the infamous "Low memory" error and closes down the book when I try to read my 8 MB copy of "Programming in Scala, 2nd Edition". It definitely detracts from the reading experience, especially knowing upfront that you can read only a few pages before you hit the dreaded error.

I suppose Knuth's book would be equally, or more, "heavy" and the Kindle would choke on the pdf versions.

Knuth loves his type-setting. He created TeX for crying out loud! I'm sure he detests what epub readers do to his works. And I'm sure he is no fan of how pdfs look on e-readers either.

If you truly believe what you wrote, you don't know Knuth.

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