ASCII is already unreadable on many popular devices
and in a few years will be no better than old versions of word.
If you can pan and scan a complex PDF file, you can pan and scan ASCII
art.
I've been doing some experiments trying to make RFCs and I-D's
readable on my Kindle. It has native support for some reflowable
formats (AZW and MOBI), and PDF. Amazon provides conversion software
that turns several other formats into their flavor of MOBI, and a
conversion service in which you e-mail documents to an address
assigned to your Kindle, and they convert them to versions that appear
on your device via a wireless network connection. You can also plug
it into your PC as a USB disk and copy MOBI, AZW, and PDF files to it.
The conversion service will accept text documents, but the results of
sending an RFC or I-D through it are too painful to read other than in
utter desperation, not just the ASCII art but the scrambled text.
The device renders PDF page images quite well, but since the screen is
so small, the text is too small to read. There's an option to select
a rectangle and expand it, but the rectangle doesn't cover an entire
line and you have to move it back and forth for every line which is
slow and painful. You can turn the Kindle sideways, it rescales PDFs
to the width of the screen, and you can use the up and down buttons.
That is large enough to read, although still pretty small. I would
have to say that PDF support is better than text, but still pretty
poor. If you have PDFs with a native 4x6 page size, they look great,
but you need to have your document in some other format that can be
reformatted and printed to small page size PDFs.
The conversion service and software handle a reasonable subset of
HTML, so I tried running the XML source for I-Ds through saxon or the
new xml2rfc, and then converting that to a Kindle native format. That
works well, text nicely reflowed, ASCII art preserved as a block, and
links to other sections and documents even work. I now use those as
working versions of my I-D's.
I haven't tried other e-readers, but the MOBI format is not unlike
ePub format, so I expect the results would be similar.
This tells me that it would be really nice to have a meta-format
(probably xml2rfc, since it exists, and it's ASCII underneath so under
even the worst scenarios the content is still accessible) that we can
render into formats that work on whatever devices we use to read stuff.
R's,
John
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