eBooks, What Format Do You Use?
- Thread starter dmccoy1693
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Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Probably a better way of asking the poll question would have been:
Information like that is useful for publishers to know when it comes to putting out material. The individual asking the question is a publisher looking to ensure the widest possible audience for his material.
Basically today there's two formats. Literal formats like PDF and MS Word documents, and flowable formats like HTML, ePub, etc. plus things like Markdown.
After that it's proprietary extensions such as DRM etc.
The flowable formats are text mostly and work well on a wide variety of readers and sizes. They also tend to be very portable and convertible from one to another. These are very nice as readers can change readers, change font sizes, screen sizes, font styles, etc.
ePub is essentially HTML with metadata, as much a "book" format as a page format. I have an ePub book on my phone, it has chapters, table of contents, etc. My phone tells me how many pages are left in the chapters, and what page I'm on in the book, but I and tweak the font size whenever I want. For my current book, I'm on page 1798 of 3174 pages. Mind, this is a generic several 100 page trade paperback book. It's just a zillion pages because of my font size and screen size.
PDF is designed for perfect copies. It's very important for graphic and layout heavy work. Rather than flowing the text to fit the screen, you zoom in and out until you can see what you want to see comfortably. Obviously most game materials are PDF as they tend to be graphic and table heavy. Plus legacy stuff is just scanned works from paper, which is the "lowest" form of electronic publishing, in my eye. But we take what we can get. I'd much prefer pure PDF in those cases, simply because the size of the scanned books is so enormous compared to pure PDF works. That's just impossible with legacy works, especially without the master documents.
As an author, format preference should not be much of an issue outside of the initial decision: are you doing a flowing work (i.e. generic book filled with text), or something layout heavy like PDF.
Because these decisions dictate your creation process and your overall design.
If you're just doing text, you can use anything structural. Word, OpenOffice, HTML, had coded XML, Markup, Troff. Anything that puts basic structure in to your raw text is translatable to pretty much anything else today. You can start in Word and end up in ePub easily. There's some pipeline somewhere that will take from your source form to some delivery format.
PDF is what it is. You start with ANY format, lay it out, and turn it in to literal PDF pages. That's on you as the author and the authoring tool suite. Again, Word -> PDF is trivial. So is HTML to PDF, etc. TeX, Troff, DocBook, other typesetting toolsets. More advanced PDF has nice things like inner links (like TOC to chapters, etc.). But PDF also offers you the ability to just "make it like this". Scan in a sketch from a napkin, plonk it in a PDF and "done". Obviously there is an entire industry around converting text in to laid out PDF files.
In the end, as a base lingua franca, MS Word is obviously VERY well supported. A lot of folks whine and complain about it, it has its issues. But there's lots of ways to work around all of those issues. I think Word requires discipline to get the structure in to it that any large document should have, because it's so easy to enter stuff in an unstructured way. It blurs the lines between semantic markup and layout, supporting both interchangeably, making it perhaps a bit too easy to mix them up.
But it's an easy way to do mass entry and get the stuff from the soft matter of your brain in to the hard matter of tangible, manageable digital assets. You can always reorganize it later. It's gotta be better than Bic pens and legal pads.
In the end, once you've may the "literal" PDF vs "flowing" text decision, whatever you start with can get you where you're going. The most important thing, is to get started creating. The tooling will work itself out later.
After that it's proprietary extensions such as DRM etc.
The flowable formats are text mostly and work well on a wide variety of readers and sizes. They also tend to be very portable and convertible from one to another. These are very nice as readers can change readers, change font sizes, screen sizes, font styles, etc.
ePub is essentially HTML with metadata, as much a "book" format as a page format. I have an ePub book on my phone, it has chapters, table of contents, etc. My phone tells me how many pages are left in the chapters, and what page I'm on in the book, but I and tweak the font size whenever I want. For my current book, I'm on page 1798 of 3174 pages. Mind, this is a generic several 100 page trade paperback book. It's just a zillion pages because of my font size and screen size.
PDF is designed for perfect copies. It's very important for graphic and layout heavy work. Rather than flowing the text to fit the screen, you zoom in and out until you can see what you want to see comfortably. Obviously most game materials are PDF as they tend to be graphic and table heavy. Plus legacy stuff is just scanned works from paper, which is the "lowest" form of electronic publishing, in my eye. But we take what we can get. I'd much prefer pure PDF in those cases, simply because the size of the scanned books is so enormous compared to pure PDF works. That's just impossible with legacy works, especially without the master documents.
As an author, format preference should not be much of an issue outside of the initial decision: are you doing a flowing work (i.e. generic book filled with text), or something layout heavy like PDF.
Because these decisions dictate your creation process and your overall design.
If you're just doing text, you can use anything structural. Word, OpenOffice, HTML, had coded XML, Markup, Troff. Anything that puts basic structure in to your raw text is translatable to pretty much anything else today. You can start in Word and end up in ePub easily. There's some pipeline somewhere that will take from your source form to some delivery format.
PDF is what it is. You start with ANY format, lay it out, and turn it in to literal PDF pages. That's on you as the author and the authoring tool suite. Again, Word -> PDF is trivial. So is HTML to PDF, etc. TeX, Troff, DocBook, other typesetting toolsets. More advanced PDF has nice things like inner links (like TOC to chapters, etc.). But PDF also offers you the ability to just "make it like this". Scan in a sketch from a napkin, plonk it in a PDF and "done". Obviously there is an entire industry around converting text in to laid out PDF files.
In the end, as a base lingua franca, MS Word is obviously VERY well supported. A lot of folks whine and complain about it, it has its issues. But there's lots of ways to work around all of those issues. I think Word requires discipline to get the structure in to it that any large document should have, because it's so easy to enter stuff in an unstructured way. It blurs the lines between semantic markup and layout, supporting both interchangeably, making it perhaps a bit too easy to mix them up.
But it's an easy way to do mass entry and get the stuff from the soft matter of your brain in to the hard matter of tangible, manageable digital assets. You can always reorganize it later. It's gotta be better than Bic pens and legal pads.
In the end, once you've may the "literal" PDF vs "flowing" text decision, whatever you start with can get you where you're going. The most important thing, is to get started creating. The tooling will work itself out later.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
I am using Apple's Pages application and then exporting to PDF. I have a strong aversion to Word.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
MS Word is NOT a literal format. I've had word documents that paginated quite differently on different machines. During my masters program, I often had to prove that the file was paginated correctly on my machine by printing to PDF and sending the PDF.
Ok, sure, that was in 2009... but the issues still exist.
I even had one that changed pagination after a system update...
Even using the online version in office 365... I've had a document paginate and line-break differently between openings.
dmccoy1693
SOC-13
I'm wondering why this discussion is ongoing. This poll is from 2009. Some of the formats mentioned in the poll don't exist anymore (to any functional degree anyways).
I'll take my books in stone tablets - those have withstood the test of time!
There are fun discussions about digital data - unless you have both the software & hardware that can use it, it is worthless. My wedding vows are on an old hard drive I still have (that may not be usable) and in Lotus AmiPro format. Pretty sure I could probably find a converter or something but as time goes on it becomes more and more likely that the text is irretrievable. Same for anything that requires DRM - server goes away you no longer have access.
Back to topic, probably safest is HTML is it is usable on about everything, and if all else you can always strip away the markup to get to the raw text.
But I always prefer "real" books. I only need light and my glasses to read them. And my LBBs from the early 80s are still available via Eyeball MK I.
Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
Greetings Dale (an excellent name by the way), I suspect that the reason for the ongoing discussion is that the poll is still active, and that the information is still useful to anyone who is thinking of publishing a work. I found it useful when I starting thinking of putting out product for Traveller and other RPG games, as well as historical material, in going with the PDF format. HTML is better for reading on small screens, as you can adjust the type size readily without massive effort. It is also good for anything posted to Project Gutenberg in terms of self-publishing or posting public domain material.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
I had used WordPerfect for years up to the point my company went all in on Office. I infinitely preferred WP because they had an edit mode that allowed you to see the tags and manipulate them directly, thus saving a LOT of time in formatting fixes/alterations.
It's the closed hood that drives me crazy. Not surprising they can't stick to a multi-decade standard, this is why they lost out on a lot of long-term computing markets.
Phones too come to think of it, a lot of losing the phone market had to do with poor implementations and unrealistic business models.
Word Perfect still allows that control mode. I've got it on my Win10 box. But it hasn't become compliant with unicode.... and I need unicode. So I am using LibreOffice.
I'll also note that WP was less flexible across machines than MS Word is.
Because it is. There is no policy against replying to old threads, other than the warning that the principals of prior discussions may no longer be active, or in some cases, no longer alive.
But I think it's fair to say that this is not by design.
MS Word documents, normally, are not designed to flow and flexible. It's part page layout, part text entry, but not quite desktop publishing. It's supposed to be "WYSIWYG(tm)".
Your printing behavior is likely one of the many charms that have endeared Word users over the years.
Let's hear it for all the people through the years using the space bar to format their Word documents and the hair they've lost in the process.
Now, that said, is COULD be used as a structured, semantic text editor to produce marked up text that can create flowable content, it just takes some (a lot me thinks) discipline to do so.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
For publishing, I use epub, pdf, and html formats. I let my readers decide what formats to download.
No two apps display one format the same way. So I have more than one viewer installed to get the best display possible.
No two apps display one format the same way. So I have more than one viewer installed to get the best display possible.
Proneutron
SOC-13
That's great that you stay away from non-standard formats.
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