The Link
They’re about the first regular NY publisher to shift, but one doubts they’ll be the last. Look at the rate at which this news is hitting the world.
The Link
They’re about the first regular NY publisher to shift, but one doubts they’ll be the last. Look at the rate at which this news is hitting the world.
There will be exceptions to this, where the document has been created from a scan so as not to have to entirely re-author complicated formatting, with footnotes, etc., or where the .PDF is simply a scanned image presented as a .PDF. However, when a .PDF has been originated from a word processor or DTP application, such as Indesign or the freely avalable Scribus, for example, the text will reflow, in a reader which supports that option.
A .PDF has the attributes of an image, to the extent that the document will display with the consistency of an image. And a .PDF can be opened in Photoshop and exported/saved as a series of high or low resolution images, for use in other applications.
Two up display is available (Acrobat 9) via View > Page Display > Two Up…
Another very useful feature is the Search panel, which, upon entering a word, will present the search results in the form of a concordance. This enables one to quickly ascertain which occurrence of a word one wants to go to, which is simply a click way.
Only AdobePro allows the option, as it is “Document creation” software rather than “Document display” software the way AdobeReader is. Believe me, AdobePro is very pricey and won’t show up on an ebook reader in the near future.
My word-processing software Pages (in the iWork suite for Mac) will save a document as a pdf, but I believe that it is a static image at that point, not anything with reflowable type.
This may be the case. An early version of Final Draft 7 would convert a script into a paged series of hi-rez images when exported as a .PDF. They have long since stopped doing this because the file size was huge, and almost impossible to scroll through in Acrobat Reader. This was probably to disable the possibility of copying text directly, as a security feature. But if a document is valuable enough, it can always be transcribed, which is also the limiting factor for DRM.
.PDF is a victim of the fact that users do things with it because it can be done, whether or not it is a good thing to be doing.