Lobsters: Lab 6

As someone who is a bit of an EPUB/MathML fanboy this pro-PDF stuff was interesting to read. Honestly my main issue with PDFs is I would like them to work well on my e-reader but they are not reflowable. However, the first issue claims:

PDFs used to be unreadable on small screens, but now you can reflow them.

Is this actually true? I have never seen this.

I wonder what the author thinks of EPUB. It is just a zip file of HTML files, which (other than the lack of static pagination, which I don’t much care about) seems like it fits most of the author’s desires. You can even edit them in the most basic text editors.

One thing I will grant PDFs is what is now fashionable (or memeable at least) to call the Lindy effect: PDF has been around for a long time, so we can expect it to exist for as long as it has been around again. MathML is very, very new by comparison.

thinks of EPUB

I'm not the author but the story I've heard is that it's all the fun of the early 2000s browser wars but now more more "embedded systems" nonsense given that a lot of the user's experience with epub is not on a desktop computer

I am still pro ePub, because unzip -qc is a much nicer debugging experience than qpdf --json, but I do think the "and now we have to work around every embedded browser quirk one can possibly imagine" is a big reason why it's not more popular

now you can reflow them.

I think it's this https://pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-q-a/#q-what-is-tagged-pdf

There is a rather wonderful tool called kpdf opt that makes them readable anywhere! I often use them on some of those terribly formatted academic papers that seem so like to have the ugly type setting.