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Comment by mr_toad | Hacker News Reader

I’d prefer a format that automatically adjusted things like page and font size to whatever I’m reading on, whether that’s reactive HTML or an ebook format.

And some e-readers do support two column layouts, although it only makes sense if you have a wide screen.

I hate having to pan and scan a PDF file on my phone, and the fixed pagination only makes sense when printed. Even on most desktop screens a letter/a4 page is too long.

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I'd like those features too, but unfortunately for reference material I find annotation and pagination more important. Annotation is broken in HTML/EPUB because there's no way to make my annotations portable across devices without vendor lock-in. Pagination is broken because HTML documents rarely contain paragraph numbers or other useful pinpoints, and browsers aren't as good as PDF readers at keeping track of your position in a long document. These are solvable problems, but until they are solved I find HTML unusable for anything that takes more than 15 minutes to read. I suspect that most people who consider PDF obsolete rarely spend that much time on a single document.

Agreed. For anything complicated, I’ll always download the pdf. I don’t really find it burdensome pan and zoom a pdf, even on mobile. It seems to work a lot better than publishers attempts at producing web versions of papers, which I find generally useless.

> reactive HTML or an ebook format

Genuine question but can you think of a website that uses reactive HTML properly and mind sharing it? I find that most websites seem to just put a maximum width on a page and call it a day.

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