The most important decision is the format. PDF support is pretty ubiquitous, but it’s not reflowable (i.e. can’t adapt to different screen sizes and user-adjusted fonts automatically), which looks bad on devices that have screens of different size than the size encoded in the PDF. Many devices implement some form of PDF reflow, which may work well for simple-layout PDFs (with no pullquotes or columns).
There’s EPUB, a good reflowable open-source XML-based format, but it has its downsides too: not all ereaders support it, and, as I gather from the wikipedia page, the situation with linking is unclear—which is important because the sequences are heavily interlinked.
There’s also CHM (Windows help file format) which is both reflowable and linkable since it’s based on HTML/CSS, but, as far as I know, few ereaders support it.
Based on my own experience, I strongly prefer EPUB. However I have no experience with its linking support.
I’d first try a linked EPUB and see how well its linking works on popular devices, or, as a second option, try a simple, sinlge-column, no-pullquotes PDF encoded for a 6-inch screen and see how well it reflows on various readers.
PDFs are pretty much write-only, and in my experience (with Adobe Acrobat-based devices) reflow never works very well. As long as you use a sane text-based ebook format, Calibre can handle conversion to other formats.
So I recommend converting into—if not EPUB, then maybe just a clean HTML (with all the links retained—readers that support HTML should have no problems with links between file sections).
Yes, some readers (e.g. Pocketbooks) can handle HTML, but even the latest Sony readers cannot. Kindle does have HTML support “via conversion” but I don’t know if it can correctly convert 600 or so interlinked documents.
I was thinking more of a single, 600-chapter document.
(Actually this is why I think Sequences are best read on a computer, with multiple tabs open, like TVTropes or Wikipedia—not on an e-reader. I wonder how Eliezer’s book will turn out...)
Yes, but you’ll still have to change the page size and recompile each of the 600 or so PDFs—this is a huge amount of work if you’re planning to do it manually. Generating PDFs for different screen sizes automatically (e.g. using a Python library) would be a better solution. I’m not familiar with PDF generation under Python, but I did a quick Google search and here’s what I found:
The most important decision is the format. PDF support is pretty ubiquitous, but it’s not reflowable (i.e. can’t adapt to different screen sizes and user-adjusted fonts automatically), which looks bad on devices that have screens of different size than the size encoded in the PDF. Many devices implement some form of PDF reflow, which may work well for simple-layout PDFs (with no pullquotes or columns).
There’s EPUB, a good reflowable open-source XML-based format, but it has its downsides too: not all ereaders support it, and, as I gather from the wikipedia page, the situation with linking is unclear—which is important because the sequences are heavily interlinked.
There’s also CHM (Windows help file format) which is both reflowable and linkable since it’s based on HTML/CSS, but, as far as I know, few ereaders support it.
Based on my own experience, I strongly prefer EPUB. However I have no experience with its linking support.
I’d first try a linked EPUB and see how well its linking works on popular devices, or, as a second option, try a simple, sinlge-column, no-pullquotes PDF encoded for a 6-inch screen and see how well it reflows on various readers.
PDFs are pretty much write-only, and in my experience (with Adobe Acrobat-based devices) reflow never works very well. As long as you use a sane text-based ebook format, Calibre can handle conversion to other formats.
So I recommend converting into—if not EPUB, then maybe just a clean HTML (with all the links retained—readers that support HTML should have no problems with links between file sections).
Yes, some readers (e.g. Pocketbooks) can handle HTML, but even the latest Sony readers cannot. Kindle does have HTML support “via conversion” but I don’t know if it can correctly convert 600 or so interlinked documents.
I was thinking more of a single, 600-chapter document.
(Actually this is why I think Sequences are best read on a computer, with multiple tabs open, like TVTropes or Wikipedia—not on an e-reader. I wonder how Eliezer’s book will turn out...)
Thanks for the info!
I suppose for PDFs we could just have a list of various widths available.
Yes, but you’ll still have to change the page size and recompile each of the 600 or so PDFs—this is a huge amount of work if you’re planning to do it manually. Generating PDFs for different screen sizes automatically (e.g. using a Python library) would be a better solution. I’m not familiar with PDF generation under Python, but I did a quick Google search and here’s what I found:
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-for-PDF-Generation/
http://www.reportlab.com/software/opensource/