How do you want it read and what's the audience? Assuming it's technical material for an HN type audience, realize that no one's going to sit and read through it at once, so you need to think about making digestible chunks and having good navigation. I like the GNU Make manual a lot and it's absurdly low tech. git-scm.com is much more modern looking but has essentially the same structure.

For tablets PDFs can work really well. If you want to be read straight through or be an offline reference (printed or tablet) that might be better but not if you're going for random access.

Man pages are a nice model too.

Edit: typo I'll attribute to autocorrect

I'd say have good typography, and use headings with anchor links (href="#foo") with a button next to it, so people can save their position, and return to it later. You can also help with this (for non-touch devices) by using the NYT's emphasis.js: https://github.com/NYTimes/Emphasis.

Manual (not automated) pagination is also an option for letting people know when to breathe.

Otherwise, it's also going to be really hard for people to link to more specific parts of it.

(off-topic to off-topic) For long papers / books, think about learning LaTeX and compiling your files to PDF (unless it must be an HTML).

LaTeX and its packages/templates have man-years of development invested into readability. All the scientific papers are produced with TeX/LaTeX. The program and packages for it solve numerous problems like proper spacing, citations, bibliography, dealing with orphan paragraphs etc. etc.

This is from 2001/2003:

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/avoid-pdf-for-on-screen-read...

Still true? Or are users okay with PDFs now? When browsing the web on my iPad, PDFs seem quite acceptable.

I prefer websites to PDF, but when we're talking about 100 pages, PDF is the way to go (unless you want to split into chapters and subchapters).

If you're on a tablet, I think you would much appreciate an ePub. I most definitely would. It's mainly for reflowing text. I know reflowable PDF is possible but I have never seen one in the wild.

It's still true from all I've seen in user tests.

Unless things like equation numbering are important, using pandoc to convert markdown to PDF via latex will be much easier and get you 80% of the way there. Then you get decent HTML for free as well.

org mode is another option for that too if you prefer their markup or like outliners (and use Emacs)

I am currently working on horizontal scrolling blog with columns. It is a real pain. But it is very much readable.

http://jsbin.com/azayum/1

I wished the "column" layout extension would get more love.

Column layout with horizontal scrolling is somewhat unintuitive for newcomers, but It's really much more readable. And, after you actually get used to it, horizontal scrolling is so much better than reading through a PDF article with multiple-column layout.

I was actually trying to make use of the column layout to layout text, but it seems that the column layout is aimed to replace div layouts, not really at formatting text. I cannot set a column limit height, which makes it totally useless to format text. I wished I could have "pagination" (ie: break the column height to the browser height), so that pressing page-down would bring me to the next screen-full of two-column text. THAT would be good.

But having two-column reflow of text is totally useless for text. I don't want to go up/down the text like I have to do with PDFs.

nice