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Virtually all e-book readers can display PDF files. Unfortunately, PDF documents are "pre-rendered" - the text is positioned on the page in absolute coordinates and text cannot reflow on smaller / larger devices (without hacks or trickery that rarely work well).
TXT files are a good option if formatting isn't a concern. Most e-book readers can display TXT ...
13
EPUB is an open format so you can find the standard specifications online. Wikipedia has a good article on the EPUB format.
If you want a brief description of the characteristics you just mentioned you can find in this article here.
Directory structure:
EpubFolderYouWant
META-INF
container.xml
mimetype
content.opf
toc.ncx
Needed files:
...
12
TL;DR; In order not to worry about the output, you have to be sure of the input and the translation process into an ebook. The input has to show you everything that is there and hide nothing, and the translation process must be deterministic.
If you only need basic formatting and want it to be consistently converted, the best you can do is use a mark-up ...
12
This is something I find interesting. I'm going to post an answer with some findings. As I discover more, I'll expand on my answer.
Old, But Still Useful Comparisons
This document is fairly old (warning, link is a zip file containing a pdf) and the information may not accurately reflect how things are today. It also does not contain many of the popular ...
11
As far as I know .mobi files can't be edited directly, they have to be converted first to another editable format. So, no, you can't directly edit .mobi files in just one step. See this thread on MobileRead forums for further reference.
Anyway, I think that there is an easy a solution to your problem. Please note that in providing the following informations ...
10
I don't think there is an official way to put footnotes, at least in EPUB2. What I do in the ebooks I prepare is to add an hyperlink to the note (placed in a chapter of its own at the end of the book, and to put at the end of the note another hyperlink which goes back to the original position. It's a bit ugly, but at least it helps readers (in the sense of ...
10
As Donald points out in his answer, (new) devices would have to support SVG 'images' as support for SVG is specified in the EPUB 3.0 standard.
For line drawings, but also for zoomable images (maps come to mind), this is a vastly superior format over any pixel based file format.
How soon that adaptation will happen will be influenced by how easy it is to ...
9
In my opinion the relative inaccessibility of DjVu's libdjvu, including having their own bytestream compression contributed to the low acceptance of the DjVu format over the years and not patent issues. This hinders other software developers adapting their software to support DjVu and even more so
when porting to a new platform.
The DjVuLibre software has ...
8
The ePub 3.0 standard specifically names SVG as one of the core media types to be supported. The 2.0 standard also names SVG as one of the supported types in the img tag documentation. So any device supporting ePub would have to be able to handle an SVG image, which is the vast majority.
8
Apart from the consideration what format the most people have, you should consider your wish to control over the layout of the text and how well the format can be converted to other formats by your readers.
Some formats like TXT allow very little control over the layout. In PDF you have much control over the layout, as you have in EPUB and MOBI.
...
7
The files and directory structure of the EPUB files is specified in the OCF (OpenContainerFormat). There are two versions are most interesting: 2.0.1 and 3.0.1. Both specify only one required file in a specific subdirectory, and that is:
META-INF/container.xml
There are some optional files that can go in that directory as well (signatures.xml, encrytpion....
7
There is an extensive (though maybe not exhaustive) list of ebook formats on Wikipedia. The article does a comparison on the formats.
The most widely supported formats are epub and pdf (and mobi/prc / KF8 / AZW if you include Amazon Kindle). Of course, plain text is probably THE most supported format, but I'm assuming you meant something that supports ...
7
If you want to be guaranteed of the fewest possible number of file conversion headaches, xhtml is your best bet. The epub format is built on xhtml, and Amazon's KF8 format seems to follow suit--at any rate, when you create a KF8 file you start with an epub. Anything other than xhtml will mean that you have to convert from that format to xhtml, so if you want ...
7
Simple answer: NO
To annotate inside an ebook would require the file to be altered on the device side and some sites will not allow this due to the DRM they add. That said this is why Kindle creates a secondary file instead of in the ebook itself. This would also depend on the app you are using to view the ebook on.
Some apps that allow Annotation for ...
7
If you are using Calibre, its database is already set to have each piece of information about a book in its proper field (i.e., there will be a field for the title, another for the author, another one for the series and series numbering, and so on), but I'm sure that you already know this.
So, within Calibre, you don't need (and you are not supposed) to ...
6
Well, since Microsoft has pretty much abandoned MS Reader… you might try using Calibre to convert the files to eOub or Mobi. That is, if there's no DRM on them.
As for your yes/no question — the answer is no, but allow me to additionally provide the reason.
The reason that there is no alternative LIT reader for Android and/or other operating systems is ...
6
I think you should take a look at Sigil, a program for creating/editing epub-format ebooks.
On the download page, there is an installer for Windows and an image for Mac.
Sigil is open source and therefore free. You can input text from whatever you are using and edit either using a code editor or a WYSIWYG editor, which makes it pretty easy. The WYSIWYG ...
6
There's no easy and global solution to it. I'd recommend using some kind of side-notes as described here.
Note that if your target is mainly EPUB3, you can create popfootnotes as described here.
6
I found PaperCrop a very useful and powerful tool. It is free and highly customizable so you can either relay to automatic detection of columns and sections by program or customize each page format.
6
Also check out k2pdfopt by Willus.
5
The short answer is no, and I don't expect there to be anything like that with a single recommendation.
The reason is that different input material is better rendered in different image file formats. All material handles well in non-lossy formats (among others most of the TIFF formats, PNG), however such format produce large files. When you look at space ...
5
The PDF file format does not support cover images.
PDF was designed to show a faithful representation of printed pages.
Reflowing text to other page sizes typically is not possible; you should use PDF on an ebook reader only when the page layout is important.
5
Yes, it can JavaScript or what they call as Acrobat Javascript , but not all the PDF viewer can are designed to follow the Adobe Javascript API. There are few limitations defined in the API, it can make Ajax network calls but no it cannot run any other then the JavaScript as of now.
But you can disable it by
Select Edit>Preferences.
Select the ...
4
Ed, the answer more depends on your purpose. The literal answer is Scrivener does indeed create valid e-books and is well maintained. I've used Scrivener for Mac for years. I've occasionally compiled the document to kindle format to carry around. That process works just fine.
If your real purpose is to Write the Great Novel or some other large and complex ...
4
If you only are afraid of your users reading the other footnotes if they are displayed as endnoted, then it might suffice to put each of them on their own page.
If you include an explicit back-link to the original location for the footnote at the end of the footnote ([continue reading ...]) as well, the reader is more likely to get back to the position ...
4
The intent of your question seems to be, "Which e-books formats are safe to buy (or obtain legally for free) - such that they will never go obsolete on any future device I use?"
There are actually several approaches to this issue, but you first need to understand a little about DRM (Digital Rights Management):
DRM attempts to prevent illegal copying of ...
4
ASCIIDoc is a nice compromise between bare bones (like markdown) and full featured (like tex).
There are lots of examples online, but the basic idea is this: you write in plain text, using as-obvious-as-reasonable styles to indicate headers, italics, lists, etc. then you can export that format to PDF, HTML, EPUB, etc.
A quick example to get you started:
...
4
I researched this issue in order to answer this related question.
What I found is that there is pretty much no way to read the file short of the software supplied by the Sky Ebook Reader Company. If you have a legitimate .sbrz file and are unable to read it on your Windows machine with their software, your best bet is to seek support from that company.
4
I think that if you provide .epub, .azw and .pdf versions of your book you can be pretty sure that you have covered the largest share of your potential readers.
For those that need another format, they can easily use Calibre to convert it, especially if they have access to the .epub version.
Edit: I don't have any statistics, but if you consider
the ...
4
Kindle uses ISO-8859-1 format, not UTF-8. So there are a lot of characters not natively included in Amazon's format. I am Spanish and I find issues with characters like — (em dash) or € (euro currency). Fortunately, you can use their html entity code instead. For instance, the html entity code for em dash is & mdash ; and the html entity code for € is &...
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