Slightly dissapointed

[amalthia]

Today someone recommended two Tardis Big Bang fics...(didn't know they were big bangs until I saw where the links went) and I noticed they have single file versions of the stories up. Only problem is that they are in PDF and sized for 8x11 pages. I'm puzzled as to why PDF ends up as the default for so many people? What's wrong with RTF, Doc, or HTML? Neither of those formats is any harder to share than PDF. I mean to create the PDF you have to start off with a doc file.

I guess for me I always try to share the easiest to convert from format where as other people seem to be picking the hardest to convert from instead. (the one most likely to screw up the author's story if you convert it to another format, crash your computer, and display's badly on the few portable reading devices that "support" pdf.)

PDF is a great final format for printing. It's never been a great format for reading on the computer or converting from. There are other file formats out there that are more flexible.

So, in the meantime, I think the only tardis big bangs I'll be reading anytime soon is from authors that elected to share their stories as a single file. With Torchwood and Doctor Who fandom I'm better off sticking to their massive archive of fics at A Teaspoon and An Open Mind.

Comments

[mllesatine]

I guess it's because you can't edit PDF files easily? I've never thought about printing out fanfic (I don't have a printer and if I'd still think it's wasteful).

[amalthia]

It's very very wasteful printing out fics especially from webpages. I used to do it and the results were rather unpredictable. Reading on an e-ink device is so much nicer and cheaper in the long run than printing fic.

PDFs are easy to edit for anyone that's good with PDF. And actually you can suck with PDF and still edit it. You just save as...pick your format of choice and let the program do it's thing. Then you have to fix the story so it looks like a real story again. Half the time the authors don't even edit their names off the PDF document!

I think elf hit it on the spot. Most people just don't know how to create their own webpages, or create a RTF file and PDF just seems like the easy option.

[elf]

Most people don't know RTF exists, and don't have an easy way to create good HTML. (Please, let's NOT have exchanges of HTML files that were output from Word 2007. Please.) And they've been warned that .doc is not a good way to exchange files--there's problems if the receiver doesn't have MS Office, and if they don't have the same fonts, you've lost a lot of how your story looks. (This objection would also apply to RTF, if they knew how to make RTF files.)

And PDFs don't get accidentally edited. If the reader's cat walks across the keyboard, the story doesn't get deleted. Word doesn't have an easy "make this edit-resistant" setting. (It's got one. But for people who can't figure out how to save as RTF, changing the security settings is waaay too technical.)

What I'd like them to do is at least switch to half-sized pages for the PDFs, which are much easier to read on a screen.

I wonder how much success we could get, making Word templates designed for ebooks, and distributing them? 3.5" x 4.6" pages, with .15" margins, 10pt font as standard, with headers/footers set to 0" instead of .5" in case they decide to throw something in there. Or even 8.5 x 5.5 pages, half-inch margins all around, would be so much easier than single-column letter-sized pages.

[amalthia]

I like the word template idea. If we made a tutorial on how to use them with screencaps that would go a long ways.

Now trying to get authors to use them...that I'm not sure how well that would work.

I guess for me I assume anyone running a website would know how to create basic html webpages and be able to convert files to HTML. With word if you use the HTML, Filter option the code isn't as much of a mess.

But you're right, lately I've been noticing more people using docx word docs not realizing that not everyone has Word 2007. Though I think there are add ons for Open Office and I'm using one on my Word 2003 to view docx files.

Making RTF files is so easy though, do people really not know how to make them? And if people can't figure out something as easy as saving a file as RTF is there any hope of telling them how to use a template?

[tenaya]

I talked to one person who wanted control over how their story looked and didn't want any one changing it. :::shrug:::

[amalthia]

shudders. Um yeah that mentality baffles me and it makes no sense! anyone can save a PDF to html, RTF, Doc, and etc... and then it's up in the air as to how their story will look afterwards. I've had a few conversions come out looking odd. The newer Adobe PDF conversion software is less buggy so far. I guess for me if I wanted my story to look the way I wanted it to look I'd offer a variety of formats so no one has to modify the format in order to read my fic.

And for those that add passwords to their pdfs it's not that hard to crack! Um I kept my Adobe 6 for such instances.