Just a note to let others know of a better file format called deja vu (.djvu) that was created by IBM and is currently marketed by LizardTech. These file formats are better than .pdf, which is the current de facto standard for electronic documents on the web, in part because of their smaller file size. Files encoded as .djvu files are hard to come by currently, and PDF's will probably still be with us for several more years, but for anyone looking for what lies beyond PDF, at least one answer is deja vu.

What is nice though is that dozens of university-level textbooks in physics, mathematics, biology, and computer science are available in .djvu format (and also some in .pdf) through file sharing programs. So for all of you information junkies out there, well there's a rich source just waiting to be tapped.

Shawn thanks for the post

How and why is this better than pdf? As Im a bit ignorant

More specifically, what is wrong with PDF that this format addresses?

Steve

A good site with more information, including an explanation of the advantages of the djvu compression technique:-

Webpage

thanks for the link, Bill. My own experience has been that djvu has much smaller file size (due to better compression algorithm) and also I find that djvu files get rendered better than pdf's in their respective viewers and are more readable. The downside is that producing djvu files or converting from pdf is not so straightforward. Apparently there are some free online downloadable command line executables that will let you convert from pdf to djvu but I have never gotten these to work, and so I've been limited so far to viewing djvu files (of textbooks) that I acquire elsewhere, but am currently not able to (efficiently) produce my own djvu files, nor convert from pdf to djvu.

Also, I have noticed that the free viewer for djvu files tends to be relatively cpu-intensive for some reason when compared with viewing pdf's in acrobat. Nonetheless, for having textbooks in electronic format, I think djvu is your best bet (assuming you can find some way to produce or otherwise find the textbook in that format).