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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 4638335" data-attributes="member: 13892">For book distribution? Well, back in the day, shareware P&P RPGs were released in .html archives, .txt files, and .rtf files. As far as I know, due to the lack of print quality formatting and artwork, nobody made a great deal of money on such endeavors. Today, such file formats are limited almost exclusively to the realm of freepress publishers. More recently, XML, LaTeX, and similar markup languages have gained small followings but both are ultimately overshadowed by PDFs. Neither is (to my knowledge) used with great frequency by anybody other than technical writers (as previously mentioned), though I do believe that some foreign RPG publishers were using LaTeX commercially at one time (end products were often converted to PDFs for sale and printing, however). Then, of course, as you're already aware you have a lot of proprietary document formats associated with certain e-book readers. These will almost certainly never catch on, as their cross-platform compatibility is effectively nil and, in many cases, stability on the intended platform also tends to be questionable (an unfortunate cost of hurried production in an exploding market). Finally, you have things like .prc and .ppt files which are not designed for printing, or book publishing. You can, of course, try to force the layout of a printed book into such a format but, as I suspect you're discovering, using a screwdriver to pound nails isn't very effective <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I'm drawing a blank on anything else (well, other than PostScript, which is the forerunner of the PDF). This is part of why I asked Jeff to elaborate. Apparently he thinks there is something out there that surpasses PDF in many (if not all) ways. If there is, I've never seen it.[EDIT: To be fair, I suspect the day will come that PDF will be supplanted as the standard electronic distribution format for publishers of RPGs — but not until a superior file format with the industry-wide appeal of PDF is actually created. So far, this hasn't happened to the best of my knowledge. Also, people using cell phones or PDAs to read books don't yet compose a large enough percentage of the current e-publishing market to trump laptop and desktop PC users, so I think that it's unlikely to happen for a while.]</blockquote>

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