When will PDFs be over?

[guivre]

* Doing both PDF and html. It is *not* easy to have two completely separate formats for the same document. I am telling you this from personal experience having made the attempt and given up. You're looking at more than double the effort, which may not make intuitive sense, but any work made toward producing a PDF is all but wasted making an html document and vice-versa. And obviously any last minute change made in one document has to be made in the other. In my case, I realized there were at least three valid spellings for the word "legionnaire" in MS Word at the time. All of this stuff may sound like a task that just takes 5 minutes, but that 5 minutes invariably turns into 15 or 20 minutes and you're going to have dozens of them for any document of respectable size.

Errr... that's because you're doing it wrong. Why on earth would you have two separate sources instead of one that is translated into the final formats? Maintaining separate formats for a single document is not a difficult task.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Here's a deal:

If you tell me what kind of non-PDF format you use, I will convert the Urbis setting into it and make it available for free (at least in its present incarnation) if you promise to give me feedback on it. There are only two limitations:

- There must be some way of generating those files without commercial software.
- It must be possible to generate the final file from multiple input files, and the final product must support navigation via internal hyperlinks.

This is good practice for me and my Perl-scripting talents, and if I get sufficient feedback, I may consider releasing a "professional" version of the setting in the same format (in addition to PDFs).

Any takers?

 

[jaerdaph]

I love PDFs and buy them almost exclusively for RPGs now. I read them on laptops and desktop monitors with the screen tilted 90 degrees so they are as big as or larger than physical hardcopy paper/page size when I read them.

I'd love a cheap, lightweight, portable PDF viewer that isn't a PC/laptop or smartphone that allows me to simulate the physical book/newspaper/comic book experience.

 

[Janx]

probably worth considering is that each "eReader" uses a different format.

I have Stanza for my iPhone
My wife has the Sony PRS505 eReader that supports a number of DRM and open formats

Then there's the Amazon Kindle, which is fairly closed

All 3 will display PDFs, abeit badly. This is why the re-flowable text was desirable, as it does tend to be more readable.

Side Note: when somebody says they want bookmarks and hyperlinks, that does not mean they want HTML. HTML is a format, but its not the only one in town (and as somebody else stated, PDF can do that as well).


The problem is akin to what websites have to deal with for mobile browsers. Making a site look good on a PC is not going to make it look good on an iPhone.

It may be a demand issue. When demand is up, people will make products that support the format.

For instance, with some work, it is possible to make a eBook out of the SRD, in a eBook format (not PDF which is NOT eBook). A layout could be done that supports those mobile devices.

So to answer the question, PDFs will be over when publishers put out material in eBook format (a term referring to support for mobile book reading devices, not a literal format).

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I'd love a cheap, lightweight, portable PDF viewer that isn't a PC/laptop or smartphone that allows me to simulate the physical book/newspaper/comic book experience.

That will probably take a few years to arrive. The reader by Plastic Logic which is supposed to come out in a couple of months sounds fairly interesting, but it will still be somewhat expensive and only display greyscale. Still, who knows what will be available in five years or so...

probably worth considering is that each "eReader" uses a different format.

Yes, that too. PDF is an universally accepted standard for ebooks, and no other format has established itself to such a degree for fluid layouts.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Here's a deal:

If you tell me what kind of non-PDF format you use, I will convert the Urbis setting into it and make it available for free (at least in its present incarnation) if you promise to give me feedback on it. There are only two limitations:

- There must be some way of generating those files without commercial software.
- It must be possible to generate the final file from multiple input files, and the final product must support navigation via internal hyperlinks.

This is good practice for me and my Perl-scripting talents, and if I get sufficient feedback, I may consider releasing a "professional" version of the setting in the same format (in addition to PDFs).

Any takers?

IIRC, the Kindle simply uses regular old HTML code for its material. As in, File, Save As, Web Page.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

IIRC, the Kindle simply uses regular old HTML code for its material. As in, File, Save As, Web Page.

I haven't actually tried putting HTML files themselves on my Kindle. And I certainly wouldn't want to put all the files of a major website on it because it would overwhelm its directory (the Kindle ebook I generated from the TV Tropes Wiki was created from more than 15,000 individual HTML files...).

But there is some conversion software available for it which you can use to convert multiple HTML files into a single ebook file, which I have used extensively. Plus, many websites aren't exactly optimized for displaying on the screen of a Kindle - in many cases you have to go through one or more pages of navigation elements before you hit the main body of the text. The scripts I wrote remove those elements, and thus make the finished ebook easier to use.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Personally, at this stage I wouldn't buy an RPG product in any format other than PDF or print. When I buy a PDF, I check out the first few pages on the screen, then jump around to the rest of the document to see if it's got the goods. If it does, I put it on the list of book I want to have printed out. I have a whole shelf full of RPG books that I've had printed, and I do prefer to have printed copies.

This works out for a couple reasons. First, the price of a PDF is usually relatively low, and it gives me the opportunity to check the product out without dumping too much money into it (of course most of this money goes directly to the publisher, so it eliminates any feelings of guilt of being cheap). Second, my shelves are pretty full, so unless I have an immediate need, it lets me keep gaming resources on file while not taking up valuable space.

For me, PDF - win/win. I don't want publishers to switch to a different format.

 

[starwed]

Personally, at this stage I wouldn't buy an RPG product in any format other than PDF or print. When I buy a PDF, I check out the first few pages on the screen, then jump around to the rest of the document to see if it's got the goods. If it does, I put it on the list of book I want to have printed out. I have a whole shelf full of RPG books that I've had printed, and I do prefer to have printed copies.

This works out for a couple reasons. First, the price of a PDF is usually relatively low, and it gives me the opportunity to check the product out without dumping too much money into it (of course most of this money goes directly to the publisher, so it eliminates any feelings of guilt of being cheap). Second, my shelves are pretty full, so unless I have an immediate need, it lets me keep gaming resources on file while not taking up valuable space.

For me, PDF - win/win. I don't want publishers to switch to a different format.

I'm a little confused... what makes you couldn't do any of the above if each book came in another format?

 

[Beginning of the End]

Where it fails is in those areas where precise format and pagination are less important than content and text flow. For example, reading on a small screen -- such as an iPhone or deliberately small GUI window. For this, a hyperlinked, searchable format that will dynamically re-flow is ideal.

Four major reasons:

(1) There's no market for HTML. For better or for worse, the history of the web has basically inculcated the sense that HTML is an amateur format. You simply don't pay money for HTML content.

(2) The RPG e-book market is still largely dominated by consumers who are going to be printing out the material they want to use at the gaming table. A print-ready format is valuable to them.

(3) Many e-book products are also print products. With a PDF you can use the exact same layout that you use for the print product. A hyperlinked archive, OTOH, is essentially a completely different layout process. In addition to the separate layout, you're also talking about separate proofreading and galleyproofing. This is expensive.

(4) For the hyperlnked format to be valuable, it has to be meaningfully hyperlinked. That's an additional expense.

Most RPG publishers -- electronic or otherwise -- are operating on tight budgets and catering to a small audience.