@hirnbrot@mstdn.io @espectalll this is exactly what I’ve been saying since forever about “reading” PDFs. Lack of reflow on PDF is shit and nobody should really consider using PDF as a serious format for reading documents.
Invoices and legal documents maybe.
50+ page-long books, HELL NO.
@L1Cafe @hirnbrot as a counter argument, I claim that it's a very clean offline document format with excellent layout and typography features that always displays as beautifully as originally intended and can be printed on demand – I actually WANT to see documents like if they were paper, at least as long as it's not (easily) possible to have packaged, offline HTML documents with proper dynamic layouts and font rendering options (ePub doesn't meet the requirements)
@espectalll @hirnbrot@mstdn.io no you do not. You do not have A4 screens. You want text to reflow properly.
@espectalll @hirnbrot@mstdn.io ePubs can have good presentation. This is a false dilemma.
@L1Cafe @hirnbrot If I were to "fix" the situation, I would upgrade the ePub standards to support and enforce CSS3 features like flexbox, grid, relative units, OpenType variarions, so on – and make sure there's a simple way to design e.g. constrained layouts with a GUI. *Then* I will find myself comfortable with something that I find better than PDFs.
@L1Cafe @hirnbrot I know what it is. The problem lies within the fact that an usual ePub reader will absolutely not have the proper CSS3 features for responsive layouts and font rendering (the standards only demand CSS2) and people neither want to make books with dynamic layouts because of the huge technical complexity over designing fixed layouts on a WYSIWYG editor or with a typesetting system like (La)TeX.