Difference Between PDF and EPUB

PDF vs EPUB

The advent of electronic documents has allowed people, especially students and writers, to create and share documents more easily and more efficiently. They can be created and shared in electronic form or printed on paper. One such electronic document is the Ebook.

Ebooks, or electronic books, are book-length publications that are published electronically and can be read on computers and other devices. They are formatted to be read on computer screens as opposed to the printed books of the past. Ebooks are written either in PDF or EPUB format.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard file format developed by the Adobe Systems. It combines a system that allows fonts to go with documents, a storage system to consolidate content in a single file, and PostScript which is a layout and graphics programming language.

A PDF file is composed of objects that can either be direct or indirect and which can be of the following types: Boolean values which represent true or false, numbers, strings, names, arrays of objects, dictionaries of objects as indexed by names, streams of data, and the null object. The layout of PDF files are either linear or optimized which allows it to be read without having to wait for the whole file to download, and non-linear or non-optimized which are slow to access because pages are not systematically arranged in the file.

Electronic Publication (EPUB, ePub, or EPub) is an electronic file format that allows files to be read even in devices that have small screens. Like a PDF, it is an open standard, but unlike PDF, EPUB is very much like a web page wherein content is reflowable and the text is resizable.
It is display oriented and uses both out-of-line and inline XML to extend its functionality. It also supports different presentations of the same file, has embedded metadata, DRM support, and CSS styling with inline vector and raster images.

The publishing industry have adapted EPUB as its standard format for Ebooks and so with most electronic reading devices, but PDF still remains the standard for sharing MS Word and Excel documents and most other static documents.
Summary:

1.Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard file format that allows easy sharing of documents while retaining the same format while Electronic Publication (EPUB) is an open standard file format that allows it to be read even on small screens.
2.PDF is print oriented and has a fixed layout while EPUB is display oriented and allows content to be reflowable and its text resizable.
3.PDF is the standard for sharing MS Word and Excel files and documents while EPUB has become the standard for Ebooks.
4.Although PDF files are read easily on computer screens, they are not compatible with other devices such as mobile phones or other electronic reading devices that have smaller screens while EPUB allows files to be read even on small screens.
5.EPUB is similar to a web page while PDF is not.

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