Show HN: PDFs from HTML

Re:Show HN: PDFs from HTML by edwr on Sunday April 04, 2021 @08:34PM (#26694176)

I'm very confused with the PDF appreciation comments. I have to read lots of PDF textbooks and reference documents for school and the experience is grating, especially trying to navigate a document with upwards of 1000 pages on the Chrome PDF reader or Adobe Acrobat on a laptop. Trying to manipulate a tiny scrollbar with a laptop touchpad is very frustrating and using gesture scrolling is tedious for a large document when you have to flip around to various pages. Perhaps I've been doing something wrong, any thoughts?

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Re:Show HN: PDFs from HTML by kumarvvr on Sunday April 04, 2021 @09:46PM (#26694525)

PDFs look and are made to feel like actual books. I see that as the primary reason for people being comfortable with PDFs. Even if their readers are buggy.

Consider the alternatives.

HTML, too much re-rendering and re-formatting.

Word - Oh No. Not in a million lives. Have you seen the atrocity that is the "reading mode" in Word?

Epub / Mobi / Etc - I have never come across good readers.

For what its worth, PDFs are great for reading on larger screens like iPads. I read them on my mobile too, but that's not good for long reads.

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Re:Show HN: PDFs from HTML by dredmorbius on Sunday April 04, 2021 @10:24PM (#26694703)

Get a dedicated ebook reader if you can.

The price is pretty reasonable up to about 7-8", and not too high to 10".

I splurged for 13" as I read a lot and often low-quality scans of small, three-column print.

The pixel density of an ebook reader (200-300 DPI) is far higher than even Retina displays. Monocrome/greyscale gives higher resolution as well (the three-elements-per-pel aspect of colour displays means you're always left with about 30% the effective resolution, though subpixel aliasing helps a lot).

Portrait will display a single page well (laptop displays suck for reading text), and for larger devices or larger-print materials, you can often manage a two-page-up display.

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Re:Show HN: PDFs from HTML by cycomanic on Monday April 05, 2021 @01:53AM (#26695737)

Well imagine reading (and searching) in an HTML document of 1000 pages upward (I certainly would not want to scroll through it) and you realise why people who read longer texts like PDFs. It seems like you have issues with your reader, but there is lots of other readers which render documents very fast.

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Re:Show HN: PDFs from HTML by rzwitserloot on Sunday April 04, 2021 @08:37PM (#26694202)

Feels very much like a channeling of Churchill's 'Democracy is the worst form of government' ditty, except as applied to HTML and PDF. PDF is horrible. But it's not 'as horrible' as HTML (with the rather loomingly large caveat that this is has very little to do with the formats and everything to do with what your average HTML dev ends up making, and only applies to the job of reading significant chunks of in-depth materials).

As a format, yes, what the fuck is everybody talking about? PDF is a disaster and should be killed off, HTML is great.

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