Am I the only one that finds PDFs great?
All I want out of a doc is for text to remain in a static position in a document so it feels ‘solid’ like a real page that’s consistent with intended formatting of whoever produced it. I feel like I only reliably get that with a PDF.
Epub and html and docs reflow, have different default fonts and spacing, and feel like your text is water spilled across a countertop more than something intentionally designed that you can trust to remain where it is. With docs your cursor changes depending on the context and you have layers of menu items that load that assume you want to either edit or customize things. Depending on what program you use for HTML it will make web-browsing related assumptions that shape your experience.
I don’t care for the file format of PDFs, but I like the idea that you have a page that was intended to be viewed a certain way and can be rendered that way, so you don’t have to american ninja warrior your way through viewing settings and fonts and spacing and customization to get things just right.
This rigidity is actually the problem with PDF, it makes them unsuited for anything but printing. Trying to read a PDF that was intended to be printed in A4 format on a smartphone is an absolute pain. One of the best selling point of Epub is that you can change the font size etc… This is absolutely necessary to make ebooks readable on a small device. When it comes to websites with mainly text content, I almost always use firefox’s reader mode, which allows me to set the font size, as well as using a dark mode.
PDF gives absolutely zero control to the user on how they should be displayed.
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