On 7 July 2016 at 11:01, Sue Shumway <chale...@us.ibm.com> wrote: > Just out of curiosity, if ePubs of z/OS books provided all the same > functionalities as PDFs (same technical content, same methods for > obtaining/saving, etc.), plus had added benefits such as visual scaling and > accessibility, would you still be so adamant about keeping PDFs?
It seems to me that the great claim-to-fame of PDFs is "print fidelity", i.e. if you print or display a PDF document it looks exactly the same as what the author intended, and is the same for everyone on every device. Well everyone has seen this fail to some extent, but still, it is a fundamental goal of the format. So fonts, column spacing, page breaks, and of course colours on suitable devices are *the same*, subject only to scaling and maybe font substitution if necessary. Other presentation formats have quite different goals. In particular, HTML and friends are geared more to matching the content suitably to the available presentation device, and I gather the ereader formats are similar in this respect. For example exact pagination is not maintained when you read a book on a Kindle; the text flow is more important when you are reading a novel. Perhaps the author can enforce some degree of fidelity, but I don't think it's a fundamental feature. I'm not sure how important these goals are when talking of IBM pubs. In the old .BOO format, tables often lost their alignment, and so for example the descriptions of RACF return codes which have three levels were often very hard to interpret in .BOO books, but always correct (at least as correct as the author made them) in PDFs. Clearly reading a print-fidelity document on a very small screen requiring much windowing is no fun. But the layout does have to be maintained in order to keep the technical results clear; these are for the most part not novels or general text. May I suggest you look at the RACF manual I mentioned above? It's "SA23-2294-01 z/OS Security Server RACROUTE Macro Reference Version 2 Release 1". Drill down to "Chapter 3 System macros", then "RACROUTE REQUEST=VERIFY (standard form)", and then "Return codes and reason codes". The PDF version is "correct". See if/how you can get the return and reason codes with their text descriptions to be readable on several devices with various screen sizes. Thanks, Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
