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a post on a retired blog, Bookland

Reading 2.0 and auto-PDFs

22 Mar 2006 at 1:44 pm

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.

[tags]Reading 2.0, eBooks, PDF[/tags]

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