Reading 2.0 and auto-PDFs
Today I read about the Reading 2.0 conference, and it’s very interesting stuff. For good summaries of the main talks, see Tim O’Reilly’s notes.
On a somewhat related note, I’m wondering about how worthwhile it is to be able to produce PDFs on-the-fly from a text/HTML/XML source. As far as beauty goes, you could get a decent approximation provided that you made sure it did copyfitting and avoided widows and orphans and so on. And that’s possible. It could never have all the charm of a human-designed book, but I suppose it would do — like the utilitarian perfect binding vs. the far more aesthetic sewn binding.
