Glo Kobo Glo: impossible to read PDFs?

[meeera]

Originally Posted by vernel1008

Based on the discussion above and my cumbersome experience...

I regret buying a Kobo Glo.

All of my books are in PDF and it is **** when reading in my Kobo Glo!

There are any of a gazillion threads here saying, over and over, that a six inch reader is not a good choice for A4/business sized PDFs. A bit of research could have prevented your current dramas. Maybe next time?

Just go ahead and sell it - you should get not that far below what you paid for it - and get the device that suits your needs. Or return it, if you're still in the "buyer's remorse" period.

Happy reading.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by meeera

There are any of a gazillion threads here saying, over and over, that a six inch reader is not a good choice for A4/business sized PDFs. A bit of research could have prevented your current dramas. Maybe next time?

I believe the poster was talking about books, not A4. Adobe recommend reflowing and do it in their own reader. Refusing to do it in an ereader like kobo is a real head-in-the-sand attitude.

[dgvirtual]

As a workaround, when I really need to, I would do pdf to ebook conversion on calibre (which basically does a reflow), and then upload the converted document to ereader instead of the pdf. This does not work on scanned pdf's, but I guess neither it would work on reflowed documents. For scanned documents, OCR solution (the free ones being tesseract-ocr or its graphical forntends for windows, osx and Linux, or Cuneiform (for Linux)) would be appropriate, but I guess that is too much of a hassle - easier to print the scanned pdf and read on paper

[ottdmk]

Adobe recommend reflowing and do it in their own reader.

Have you looked at a PDF using Reflow in Adobe Reader? It's a hack job. In the PDFs I use, the layout comes out looking horrible. On some pages nothing happens. On other pages, you have one column of text... and the other column is empty.

And this is from the company that created PDF. Now apparently it's possible for a document creator to optimize their document for reflow using tags. I wonder how many bother?

So what's the better approach... implement reflow, and risk the wrath of people who complain the feature sucks (a feature that not even Adobe themselves can make work properly) or Kobo's current approach, which is to display the document exactly as specified (which, after all, was the primary purpose of PDF in the first place?)

I suppose an argument could be made that Kobo shouldn't support PDFs at all. I'm very glad they do. It works great for what I need it for.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

Have you looked at a PDF using Reflow in Adobe Reader? It's a hack job. In the PDFs I use, the layout comes out looking horrible. On some pages nothing happens. On other pages, you have one column of text... and the other column is empty.

And this is from the company that created PDF. Now apparently it's possible for a document creator to optimize their document for reflow using tags. I wonder how many bother?

So what's the better approach... implement reflow, and risk the wrath of people who complain the feature sucks (a feature that not even Adobe themselves can make work properly) or Kobo's current approach, which is to display the document exactly as specified (which, after all, was the primary purpose of PDF in the first place?)

I suppose an argument could be made that Kobo shouldn't support PDFs at all. I'm very glad they do. It works great for what I need it for.

Looked at it? I own an ereader that does it wonderfully!! You cite bad examples. Nearly all novels are simple one column format, most with few or no illustrations and they reflow excellently.

[ottdmk]

So they would either have to make reflow an option (and still have to face the complaints of folks who would use it on the "wrong" PDFs) or turn it on by default and have to explain how their PDF reader only works with some PDFs. Doesn't sound terribly appealing to me either way.

Kobo is a company that has created an e-reader primarily so that people can read e-pubs purchased from Kobo. They've gone the extra mile to distinguish themselves by allowing books from numerous different sources. But it escapes me why they should put time, effort & money into a feature that would benefit only a tiny minority of their potential users.

I am rather curious about something... where do people get novels in PDF? I can't think of any place that sells novels in PDF only. For the simple reason that PDFs are a lousy format for e-readers...

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

So they would either have to make reflow an option (and still have to face the complaints of folks who would use it on the "wrong" PDFs) or turn it on by default and have to explain how their PDF reader only works with some PDFs. Doesn't sound terribly appealing to me either way.

Kobo is a company that has created an e-reader primarily so that people can read e-pubs purchased from Kobo. They've gone the extra mile to distinguish themselves by allowing books from numerous different sources. But it escapes me why they should put time, effort & money into a feature that would benefit only a tiny minority of their potential users.

I am rather curious about something... where do people get novels in PDF? I can't think of any place that sells novels in PDF only. For the simple reason that PDFs are a lousy format for e-readers...

Yes, of course, reflow should be an option. Default to not reflow if you like, then - problem solved.

Most libraries I use, powered by Overdrive, offer PDFs for many of the books. I agree, epub is becoming / has become more prevalent - thank goodness.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Most libraries I use, powered by Overdrive, offer PDFs for many of the books.

In my case I'd say SOME of the books, not many of them.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by PeterT

In my case I'd say SOME of the books, not many of them.

I've actually been presented with ONLY a PDF version on occasion. I am really glad that is becoming less and less common.

I think ePubs should be the standard - but it isn't helped by companies inventing there own proprietary variations.

[guma]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

So they would either have to make reflow an option (and still have to face the complaints of folks who would use it on the "wrong" PDFs) or turn it on by default and have to explain how their PDF reader only works with some PDFs. Doesn't sound terribly appealing to me either way.

I would assume that the current state where KOBO advertises 'full pdf compatibility' creates more disappointed users.
Explaining the difference between pdfs being - strictly technically - fully supported but ergonomically utterly unusable is no easy task either (look at this thread).
And it has to be said that, even discarding the potential implementation of text reflow, the current handling of pdfs on KOBO readers is ergonomically dysfunctional since, once you zoom, turning pages is an ergonomic nightmare.

Anyhow ... pdf reflow unquestionably would be perceived as a big improvement in usability by the majority of users. And it is a functionality/feature that people are used to by now. To argue that it is against the design principles of ADOBE pdf seems a bit weird since Acrobat reader itself offers this functionality (and it works perfectly fine there ...).

[ottdmk]

Anyhow ... pdf reflow unquestionably would be perceived as a big improvement in usability by the majority of users.

Please don't fall into the fallacy of believing that the opinions represented on this or any other forum represent "the majority of users." Doesn't happen except by accident. Without proper market research no-one can ever tell what "the majority" wants.

You can argue the same way about my feelings that the functionality would only benefit a small minority of Kobo's market. All I have to base *that* on is the fact that very few mass-market retailers offer pdf-only product. Marginally better then using the consensus of a forum, but not by a heck of a lot.

In any case, Kobo uses a third party application, licensed from Adobe, to display epubs. They use their own rendering engine for their "value-added" kepubs. It would not surprise me that the fact that they can render PDFs at all is a side-effect of using Adobe software and hence will never get any development time from Kobo.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

. It would not surprise me that the fact that they can render PDFs at all is a side-effect of using Adobe software and hence will never get any development time from Kobo.

The Adobe software supplied and used in other ereaders I have used, supported reflow. I can only reason, therefore, that the PDF viewer Kobo are using is their own.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by jusmee

The Adobe software supplied and used in other ereaders I have used, supported reflow. I can only reason, therefore, that the PDF viewer Kobo are using is their own.

As near as I recall, until Adobe's Mobile Reader 9 release a few years back, AMR did not support reflow. OTOH, it does support PDF and ePub with DRM. Since I can download and open a DRMed PDF from the local library, I'd suspect that Kobo is using AMR for both ePub and PDF rendering.

OTOH, since the results I've seen using reflow on my computer were pretty poor and my major need is to have PDFs with full page diagrams displayed in a readable size, I will continue to use my iPad for PDFs.

Regards,
David

[jusmee]

It is informative to read modileread's own wiki about reflow.
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/PDF#Reflow

[fred_yu_job]

NEVER EVER argue with users!

I really hope that it's not KOBO's point saying, as someone claimed here, that "If you don't like how PDF documents render on a device, get your material in another format more suitable for the device".

The market never ever believed excuse!

Users will for sure get other device if you can't do it well! is it simple?
and there is no chance of argument when user makes the decision!

if the user wants to have a better PDF reading experience, and if SONY is just a LITTLE better than KOBO, the user will for sure choose the SONY e-reader!

remember : NEVER EVER argue with users! just try you best to do it!
it's okay if you can't do it perfectly, but at least you should try to do it better than the others!