Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Stephen Thorne wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 3:22 PM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
>> I'd like a pdf reader that would recognize multi-column formatting and have
>> a
>> mode so that the up-down arrows go up-down following columns rather than
>> pages.
>>
>
> Surely the solution for reading books is to ignore pdf - a format optimised
> for serialising text for print such that printing (which the XO doesn't even
> support yet) works the same way everywhere - and going to another well
> defined format more suitable for reading on a computer, such as text, rtf or
> html?

only if you have the ability to convert from .pdf to other formats.

there is an incredibale amount of material available in pdf format. and 
since it is so tightly related to printing, it's trivial for publishers to 
make electronic versions of documents available in pdf as a side effect of 
their printing process, so the volume is going to continue to grow 
rapidly.

being able to use these documents effictivly is a very important thing.

until high-res screens become available (and cheap) in A4/letter sizes, 
there will be a need to adapt from the pdf to the screen. scrolling 
vertically through the document works for many things, but not for 
multi-column documents.

David Lang
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