View Single Post
Old 06-14-2009, 05:56 AM   #3
wallcraft
reader
wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.wallcraft ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
wallcraft's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,975
Karma: 5183568
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Mississippi, USA
Device: Kindle 3, Kobo Glo HD
Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce View Post
PDF Table of Contents is not supported.
This one most clearly demonstrates that Amazon has not taken the time to do PDFs right. We know that mobile Adobe Digital Editions (which is what Amazon is using for PDFs) supports PDF TOC's via a separate interface than PDF displaying, because Sony takes advantage of this on its Windows viewer (see the screenshot). This is exactly what Amazon needs to add the TOC to the KDX's PDF menu, but they decided to rush out the product without even this basic capability.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce View Post
The dictionary function is not available.
The highlight function is not available.
The annotate function is not available.
Hyperlinks in a PDF are not accessible.
You can't move the 5-way controller to acess the cursor when viewing a PDF at all.
I think these may all be related to the missing 5-way capability. However, for annotation and highlighting there is the additional issue of how to specify a location in the PDF accurately. Annotations at the page level should be easy to do though. Dictionary access may need more than just being able to select a word, but, on the other hand, the iRex DR1000S allows MobiPocket dictionaries to be used in PDFs.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce View Post
You can't change the font size (although tilting the DX to landscape mode does enlarge the images and text).

You can't zoom in (although tilting the DX to landscape mode does enlarge the images and text).
Changing font size implies "reflow", which mobile ADE is capable of doing (so Amazon chose not to implement this). I am not convinced that reflow of letter/A4 PDFs is needed on a 9.7" screen, so Amazon may have got this right. I would like to have seen some kind of zoom for images and for 2 column documents. A general zoom may again be difficult without 5-way support. Splitting the page into quarters for 2-columns seems doable and helpful.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce View Post
The text to speech function is not available.
Adobe Desktop Reader has "read out loud", but reading order isn't necessarily obvious for a PDF. If a PDF can be reflowed then it is suitable to be read out loud.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce View Post
All PDFs are shown under "Personal Docs", not Books.
All PDFs are currently "Personal Docs", at least in the sense that you did not buy them from Amazon. Do you want a separate category for PDFs? This would seem in part to be a metadata issue (what metadata is needed for a PDF to be a "book"?).

Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce View Post
You cannot directly download PDF files to the device wirelessly like you can with MOBI; you have to transfer them via USB.
I wonder why not. I assumed the $0.15 per MB charge was instigated precisely because KDX PDFs could be large. This one can probably be fixed at the server level.

Or do you mean:

Can't download PDFs with the web browser.
Attached Thumbnails
Click image for larger version

Name:	Mistborn_TOC.gif
Views:	1472
Size:	127.4 KB
ID:	30759  

Last edited by wallcraft; 06-14-2009 at 05:59 AM.
wallcraft is offline   Reply With Quote