Morning all, On 07/02/11 10:34, Dave Walker wrote: > Just a suggestion - if you are going to work on producing a better version of > the manual then I would suggest that PDF is NOT the best format. It does > not tend to display well on modern ereader type devices, and does not support > features such as text-flow if font sizes are zoomed. I would suggest that a > format such as epub is better, and failing that the standard fall back of > word format. It is easy enough to create PDF files from these formats, but > going the other way is much harder and sometimes impossible. If you had a > book in epub format then a program such as Calibre can easily convert it into > HTML suitable for use on a web site.
I agree entirely. I use Calibre on my laptop to manage over 350 manuals and books that I "need" for my work, and I'm adding more almost daily. These are then copied over to my iRiver Story for use at work when I'm away from the laptop. PDF handling on all these gizmos is pretty bad, but I can read ebooks in this format by selecting "reflow" to convert on the fly to epub. It's not ideal as sometimes diagrams get butchered beyond all possible belief. I create all my own PDFs using Docbook XML and from that I can generate PDF/HTML/WORDML/RTF/EPub/Etc from exactly the same source file. Having said that, my iRiver does have problems with pre formatted text that extends too far right in some of my documents when using the Docbook sources to create ePub files. I can [easily?] fix it by setting better margins I suspect, but I haven't tried yet. It's in my todo list! So, my advice to anyone considering writing documents is simple, do it in Docbook. Do it once and create many different formats. Unfortunately the learning curve is not shallow, but it's not steep either! Have fun. -- Norman Dunbar Dunbar IT Consultants Ltd Registered address: Thorpe House 61 Richardshaw Lane Pudsey West Yorkshire United Kingdom LS28 7EL Company Number: 05132767 _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
