[Bookeen] Answer on PDF
Hello Mobilereaders,
Concerning PDF on the Cybook gen 3.
First of all, PDF support can be absent from the first software release. I don't say that it will not be available for sure, we even have some chances to get it on time, but I prefer to be as realistic as possible.
As Harry told us, the Cybook Gen 3 screen is much smaller than a A4 page and displaying a non reflowable page on a 6" screen even with a SVGA (800x600) resolution is not an easy task.
To solve this issue, we propose three displaying modes:
- full page in portrait mode: some PDF can be read in this mode, especially the PDFs generated for small screen, like the
feedbooks ones (great solution provided by Hadrien and Loic in France).
- half page in landscape mode: two 6" screen in this mode are almost the size of a A5 page (half A4) and the resolution becomes 800x1200 which begins to be enough for most of the PDFs. But as the screen remains quite small, your font size will also remain small and you will need to have a good sight to read genuinely in this mode. You will be able to jump from half-page to half-page with a small overlap, not to loose context.
- Quarter page in portrait mode: four 6" screen in this mode are almost the size of a A4 page and the resolution becomes 1200x1600 which is perfect for PDF files. You will be able to jump from quarter-page to quarter-page with a small overlap, again not to loose context.
As the Eink screen is quite slow, in mode 2 and 3 you won't be able to pan the PDF as we were able to do on the prvious Cybook (which runs a LCD screen).
Our main concern on the PDF is processing speed. We had had quite good benchmarks on our previous Cybook (running only at 66MHz) with our PDF reader, we hope to do better with the 200MHz of the new Cybook.
Best regards to all of you,
Michael Dahan
Bookeen