Re: Re: Which format is best for a book that will be downloaded?

Christopher R. Maden <crism-KB/[email protected]> wrote:

> That said, PDF might be the right choice.  If you care about the details
> of formatting and layout, and especially if you expect users to print
> the book, then you should use PDF.  HTML is all about giving the *user*
> more options for layout; their choice of fonts, sizes, reading width,
> etc.  This is generally a good thing, but it makes some authors twitchy,
> and is generally terrible for printing.

I tend to agree.  I think HTML is more generally accessible than PDF
(not every machine comes with a PDF viewer, but almost all come with an
HTML viewer -- a Web browser).  The big disadvantage of HTML (and, if
you choose HTML, use the XHTML variant), is that it's not a single-file
format, so any included content (CSS stylesheets, images) go in
different files, and even a single HTML "page" can consist of a lot of
individual files.  It's really designed for Web sites, not documents.
You can work around this if you know what you're doing (see, for
instance, RFC 2397 on the "data:" URI scheme), but it's tricky.

PDF, on the other hand, really is designed for documents.

Bill


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