Sunday, April 11, 2010

I'm happy to report that I've been able to get an iPad while visiting California on a business trip. So I've been trying SmallNews output on it. The best format to use ought to be epub, as this is what the new iBooks application supports. But unfortunately, I've not been able to install that as the iPad App Store currently only supports US accounts, and I only have a UK one.

So in the meantime, I've been e-mail the PDF versions to myself to see what those look like. Neither the full PDF or the eBook version looks quite right - the full version looks too small (see below), and the eBook version too big. Not surprising really, as the screen size is somewhere between a typical eBook reader and an A4 page.

So, for the moment, I've made a minor change to the eBook version, to change the page size, and use 2 columns.

This feels just the right size for the iPad screen.

What this tells me is that I ought to change SmallNews so that instead of picking which of an ever-increasing list of sizes should be created, the page size, number of columns and font size of the PDF versions should be configurable directly.

I still think epub will end up being the best approach, but PDF provides a useful alternative, so I will continue to support it.