I have been working on various ebook projects and am frustrated by the amount of "hand coding" required to make an ePub book work well with several reader applications. When a book looks just right on one reader, it looks odd on another. Yet, we know the future is digital. Most computer users are familiar with Adobe's ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF). The benefit of using PDF files is that a file includes all graphics, fonts, and layout information. A file appears nearly identical on every computer, tablet, handheld device, et cetera. A magazine in PDF looks like the designer intended — and design is the emphasis of the entire Adobe product line. Adobe's Creative Suite applications are for designers, not writers. ePubs take a different approach, closer to the original intentions of HTML and similar document "markup" formats. Yes, you can put words in bold or change a few colors, but the intent of ePub is to allow the reader, the computer user, t...
technology • teaching • writing