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   Will Crichton (tonofcrates@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 08:55:13 JST Will Crichton

   I wrote some ideas for how to actually make HTML documents a viable replacement for PDFs.

   https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/

   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 08:55:10 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Matthew W. Thomas
     @mwt @tonofcrates these 3 reasons are exactly why it will never happen
   • Embed this notice
     Matthew W. Thomas (mwt@econtwitter.net)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 08:55:11 JST Matthew W. Thomas

     in reply to

     @tonofcrates I like the PDF theme

   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 23:33:15 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Matthew W. Thomas
     @mwt
     
     1) this portable epub is not epub and will likely not gain traction
     
     2) reader software/hardware will not be able to guarantee it looks reasonable, it will always be best effort. people with the cheaper readers with the buggier rendering engines will always have a terrible experience
     
     3) the average author will not be putting in the effort to guarantee readability of the document on obscure readers
   • Embed this notice
     Matthew W. Thomas (mwt@econtwitter.net)'s status on Friday, 26-Jan-2024 23:33:16 JST Matthew W. Thomas

     in reply to

     • feld

     @feld @tonofcrates aren't those just the properties of epubs that, already exist?

     I think the issue is that many people who make PDFs don't want flexibility, they want total control/consistency of the end product (and PDFs are very good at that)