Home / Sumatra PDF cannot do tables

andrewmyles

I don’t like epubs. I really don’t. PDF should have always been a standard. But alas, here we are, in times when most ebooks are in the damn epub. Why is it damned? Well, I have never been able to find an epub reader that properly displays the books (i do things exclusively on PC).

So, let’s take example of Gretchen McCulloch’s “Because Internet”. Using epubreader, the book looks like this:

And it’s okay. Please notice the table, and how table-y it looks.

Now let’s try Sumatra PDF and OH DEAR GOD!

Seriously? A TABLE is too difficult to read?!

GitHubRulesOK

Thats odd even the publisher Barnes and Noble shows it exactly the same scale but chop bits off !!!

eBook formats are trying to catch up with HtMl and PDF features such as Tables, Media etc but it would be so much simpler if someone just developed a good HtMl5 format for publishers, (Note epubreader is an HTML5 based ebook reader, so probably converts the source) I would stick with a PDF version.

here is the inline microphone its the smallest item (unscaled at 1.4 inches) but like the others should have been scaled down better
here is the code showing it is to be displayed at 136x134 pixels
< img width=“136” height=“134” class=“h1em” id=“image_page_8_2” style=“width: 136px; height: 134px;” alt=“microphone” src="…jpg" xsrc="…jpg" xheight=“134” xwidth=“136”>

It was probably meant to be something like 1/3 "

SumatraPeter

This has been an issue for years now:

The table looks slightly better in MuPDF 1.17.0, but still a way to go… (Sumatra at present doesn’t use MuPDF for EPUB display.)

GitHubRulesOK

Hi Peter we went through this scalar issue with a pirate “giant button”
Is your sample of above table good enough to post in that issue ? or is it also a modified variant?

SumatraPeter

I just did a web search for the book’s title and found a retail EPUB of the same. Don’t want to upload a pirated copy in its entirety. However I did modify it to simply wipe out the body text of the XHTML files for chapters 2-8 (while leaving chapter 1 with the table above untouched). I also deleted all the images that were referenced by those 7 wiped chapters in order to reduce the file size further. The remaining pages of the edited file look exactly the same as the original in all the viewers that I tried. I’ll attach it to issue 1120 so that you can test it as well.