On: Ray Kurzweil Vows To Right E-Reader Wrongs

[bitwize]

Uhhhhh....

My Android has a pdf reader. It renders anything that fits within its memory constraints easily.

How is Kurzweil Handwaving, Inc. going to substantially improve on that? Scale it up to a nice sharp (PixelQi?) display, put it on a tablet -- presto.

[xenophanes → bitwize]

Memory constraints? That's not good! My iPod PDF Reader (GoodReader) knows how to load pages one at a time so I can read full length books no problem.

[Goosey → bitwize]

Not sure why you are getting downvoted so much. I had the exact same thoughts after reading this.. "Uhm, so we have a new post script?"

[jonhohle → Goosey]

PDF and postscript have no ability to reflow text. That is a huge limitation for reading the same content on mobile devices, tablets, and PCs. This has been discussed before here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1394134

I think its somewhat sad that Knuth solved this problem in 1978 and we're still dealing with terribly formatted web pages and ebooks over 30 years later.

[beambot → bitwize]

Indeed. And preserving text formatting has been effectively handled by TeX / LaTeX for decades...