Let's put pressure on Amazon. We want PDF reflow!

[varmemester]

A lot of people on this and similar forums want the PDF reflow feature. Other Ereaders have it.
We want it too. So me put some pressure on Amazon.

(1) Go to Customer Contact for Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/kindle-help.html
(2) Insert your email and password
(3) Copy and paste this (or write something similar):

PDF reflow request for Amazon Kindle
Dictionary lookup, notes, and highlights for PDF files are great features!
What's missing is PDF reflow. A lot of other Ereaders have this feature…
Please add this feature to the Kindle.



And feel free to give a heads up in this thread when you've done it.

[cvkemp]

even then it would not reflow if the document was not set with reflow enable.

[varmemester]

Some will turn out good; some won't. Still...any improvement for pdf reading would be welcome IMO.

[JMikeD]

The best improvement would be to convince people not to put documents in PDF format at all.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by varmemester

A lot of people on this and similar forums want the PDF reflow feature. Other Ereaders have it.
We want it too. So me put some pressure on Amazon.

(1) Go to Customer Contact for Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/kindle-help.html
(2) Insert your email and password
(3) Copy and paste this (or write something similar):

PDF reflow request for Amazon Kindle
Dictionary lookup, notes, and highlights for PDF files are great features!
What's missing is PDF reflow. A lot of other Ereaders have this feature…
Please add this feature to the Kindle.



And feel free to give a heads up in this thread when you've done it.

Best way to get PDF reflow:

1. Rip out the text and images.
2. Convert to epub.
3. Throw away the PDF file.


Derek

[xnowimcoolx]

It has everything to do this PDF as a format and almost nothing to do with Amazon. Good fight, but you're fighting the wrong person.

Originally Posted by JMikeD

The best improvement would be to convince people not to put documents in PDF format at all.

Totally agree!

varmemester, you should direct your energy and disgust at Adobe. They designed PDF and they failed to update it to adequately work with smaller devices. The crap really doesn't even work well with larger monitors attached to computers. It was designed during the print and read it era of the early 1990s and is too antequated to work well in the 2010s.

[Jack Tingle]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Totally agree!

varmemester, you should direct your energy and disgust at Adobe. They designed PDF and they failed to update it to adequately work with smaller devices. The crap really doesn't even work well with larger monitors attached to computers. It was designed during the print and read it era of the early 1990s and is too antequated to work well in the 2010s.

Whoa! That's not fair. I'm not now, nor have I ever been a fan of either Adobe or PDF, but don't just dump on them.

Adobe designed it for document portability among desktop and laptop computers. It was intended to be a secure, universally printable version of of a Postscript printer control file. For that, it works fine.

Over the years, various people have used it for a lot more things. To help with these Adobe added tagging to make it friendlier for small screens. Tagging works fine, when the creator uses it.

If you want to criticize someone, criticize the creators who don't tag, and who don't consider their customers' needs. Adobe will someday answer for many sins. PDF's unsuitability as an ebook format isn't one of them. (Some of their salesmen and flacks, OTOH, might have some questions to answer.)

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[Esquire1]

Buy an iPad if you want to properly read PDFs. I knew the Kindle 3 wouldn't do PDFs well when I bought it. I don't care. I bought it for .mobi ebooks.

Don't buy products with the hope it'll do something well in the future.

But hey, I totally understand where you're coming from. I just don't have any faith PDFs will work well on the Kindle 3, well, ever

[DiapDealer]

But hey, I totally understand where you're coming from. I just don't have any faith PDFs will work well on the Kindle 3, well, ever

Mainly because Amazon doesn't sell ebooks in pdf format.
They'll support pdf, and you might get a few improvements here and there, but that's about it.

[notatoad]

Originally Posted by jswinden

varmemester, you should direct your energy and disgust at Adobe. They designed PDF and they failed to update it to adequately work with smaller devices. The crap really doesn't even work well with larger monitors attached to computers. It was designed during the print and read it era of the early 1990s and is too antiquated to work well in the 2010s.

the fault is much more with amazon that it is with adobe. there's plenty of reasons to hate on adobe and pdf, but looking bad on a 6" screen isn't one of them. the PDF format was designed so that a document would look the same on your screen as it did when you printed it. so what is on the third page is always on the third page, no matter how you view it.

reflow is the problem that PDF was designed to solve. when people mailed documents, they'd open with different fonts or margins or something depending on the word processor settings and the page layout would be different. people didn't like this, and started using PDF so that documents wouldn't change between platforms. it's not a flaw in PDF, it's just that PDF isn't suitable for ereaders. the fault lies squarely with people who unnecessarily package documents as PDFs.

when you reflow a PDF, you're basically throwing away all the PDF data and converting it to a text file. it would be nice if amazon could include this feature on the device instead of making us rely on programs like calibre to do it for us.

[Josieb1]

when you reflow a PDF, you're basically throwing away all the PDF data and converting it to a text file. it would be nice if amazon could include this feature on the device instead of making us rely on programs like calibre to do it for us.

Exactly. I've sent an email anyway, if Sony can do it i don't see why Amazon can't.

It doesn't really affect me though as all my PDF's (and its the main format used in fan fiction) are txt based so i format them to MOBI in Calibre, but its anoying if i forget to do it first, load my PDF, then have to delete it and start again!

With the Sony i didn't have to format it to another format first.

[JSWolf]

Reflow can make a serious mess of your ePub and make it virtually unreadable.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Best way to get PDF reflow:

1. Rip out the text and images.
2. Convert to epub.
3. Throw away the PDF file.


Derek

Better idea and one that works 100% of the time.

Just say NO to PDF!!!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Reflow can make a serious mess of your ePub and make it virtually unreadable.

But it can also allow you to read a PDF document which is otherwise unreadable.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's a lot better than nothing. The Kindle is pretty much the only reader on the market not to offer PDF reflow - it is a strange omission.

Whether or not we like PDF is irrelevant; it is an undeniable fact that there is a huge number of PDF documents out there, which many people need to be able to read.