Academic .pdfs

[Pets0undz]

Apologies if this is a double-post, but I don't see my previous message on the site.

Anyway, I'd like to know how well publication-ready .pdfs display on the Reader. Many of these are formatted for a pretty small printable area, so there's some hope they'd be legible. For an example, see
Authenticated Key Exchange, for instance. Can anyone import this into their Reader and tell me if it's legible?
Cheers
Dan

[InspectorGadget]

I downloaded the PDF and something's totally wrong with the font -- it doesn't display characters at all. Just line graphics where the words are. Even if you fix the font, it would suck because of the margins.

Your best bet is to convert it to text and/or heavily edit it with something like "Book Designer" covered elsewhere in this forum. I'm a total novice with BD but I imported your PDF and it must have some funky tags in it because it comes up butchered.

I tried saving it as a DOC file from Acrobat 7.0 (usually works pretty darn well) and it butchered it totally. Sideways pages, weird fonts, corrupted formatting.

This PDF is really, really funky. Sorry I can't be more specific but I'm at the limit of my PDF knowledge.

[Pets0undz]

Ah, well, many thanks for taking the time to look. That .pdf is pretty typical of those I'm continually printing and carrying around. It's produced from LaTeX and dvipdf to meet a particular academic publisher's (Springer-Verlag) requirements.

Just to make sure I understand what you're saying (your knowledge of PDF far exceeds mine!), when you just open the document in Acrobat, you can read the text, yes? It's when you try and translate it for the Reader that things break down? I can read and print the document myself just fine, I lack a Reader and software to find out how well the Reader would display it.

[Yaksha]

You won't be able to put that PDF straight onto a Reader and be able to read it, the text is too small.

As InspectorGadget suggested, get BookDesigner (there are several threads in the Reader forums about it) and try and convert the PDF in BookDesigner. If you can get it to a point where it's readable and looks OK to you in BD, then it should look fine on the Reader.

I don't know if it's going to be able to handle the equations you have in there:

E is instantiated by Epw(x) = x
H(pw)

Among other things. But give BD a shot and see how it turns out.

[Hadrien]

I don't think that Book Designer is the best solution for academic files.
Stick with LaTeX but use pdflatex to create your pdf instead of making a dvi file and then a PDF.
You'll need to change de page size using something like:
\geometry{paperwidth=90.00mm,paperheight=120.00mm}
Oh and increasing the font size should improve the whole thing too.
Overall, you can make something quite good looking, you'll just have to edit the paper and font size each time.
An e-ink reader with A4 and PDF support: that's what we need for academic papers !

[InspectorGadget]

Unfortunately, I think the idea is to download academic texts created by others so YOU can read THEM. In that case, you don't have the LaTex source to re-render, unless academics are in the habit of publishing their source (or giving it for the asking...).

Hey, there might be a cottage industry here -- formatting academic texts for various eBook formats! If it comes from the original authors, you have access to the original text and figure images.

[Pets0undz]

Yep, that's it exactly. I have the LaTeX source for my papers (thanks for the LaTeX suggestion!), but not for others. So I'm continually printing them, carrying them about, leaving them around the house until the girlfriend pitches them. At which point I print, carry, leave,....

[jakeluck]

I use the quarter-page mode in PDF RasterFarian to process letter-size academic papers for using on the PRS. Works great! thanks alex_d

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by InspectorGadget

Unfortunately, I think the idea is to download academic texts created by others so YOU can read THEM. In that case, you don't have the LaTex source to re-render, unless academics are in the habit of publishing their source (or giving it for the asking...).

Hey, there might be a cottage industry here -- formatting academic texts for various eBook formats! If it comes from the original authors, you have access to the original text and figure images.

It depends. On arXiv for example (http://arxiv.org/) you have the source of the file. Academics usually publish their source.