Hi, first post - have been lurking this excellent forum a while.
On topic: I've used Foxit to read some PDF ebooks on a netbook. A problem is that Foxit (like most PDF readers) can't handle rotated mode well.
My netbook is lightweight enough to be held and read on the side, like a regular book. It is more comfortable than it may sound. And the rotated screen better fits the pdf files format. But Foxit (even in rotated mode) still expects scrolling to occur up/down (which when rotating the laptop means left/right).
What Foxit (or some other PDF software) should do:
1. when user selects rotate mode, ROTATE THE ENTIRE PROGRAM WINDOW.
2. when in rotated mode, add options for trimming white borders or at least some user configurable zoom modes (with hotkeys)
Fixing 1 & 2 would do wonders for netbook pdf ebook reading.
Going a bit off topic:
In general I'm really puzzled by the lack of large screen e-ink readers tailored for PDF reading. There is a gigantic scientific community that read loads of PDF journal articles daily. Yet most ebook readers seems aimed for personal novel reading use or for people with extreme portability requirements.
For academic purposes any ebook reading device has three competitors: printed paper, regular computer screen, physical book.
An A4 sized, wired e-ink reader weighing as much as one kilo would still win over that competition all things considered. So why aren't there a lot of those around? (or are there?) I'm new so you tell me
Edit: I looked into some other PDF viewer mentioned above and found tha Sumatra PDF (
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/...pdf/index.html ) works slightly better than Foxit for rotated reading. It still has the scrolling problem. Since it is open source I'll post what I wrote above as a request there.
Edit2: I'm also aware that some Nvidia GPU's for example can rotate the entire screen (OS and all). But I don't think the embedded GPU's in standard netbooks can handle that.