KOBO pdf thumbs-down

[JCSullivan]

I am not a happy camper at all in respect of kobo and pdf.

Opening a pdf gives different results.

• Panning left or right takes for ever.
• Up or down one line at a time - please.
• Pdf where the page number doesn't change but the content does.
• Type which will NOT re-size

I'm tired of seeing the I'm Reading list. Anyone else as disappointed as me?

Do other readers have the same problems?

[DannyElfman]

I've got many pdf books, 6" size (ready for ereader) but because of the size of the book and the display size, have a lot of pages. By a lot, I mean more than 800 pages on average.
Anyone has tested an ebook formatted pdf with many pages ? Is it slow to turn pages ? Is it possible to have a bookmark on a pdf documents ?

[lchen]

I find that the PDFs work fine, but they're scaled to fit the screen. (one of the reasons I picked up the KoboEReader was for PDFs)

So fonts and glyphs on pdfs that are formatted at 8.5x 11" appear small.

I agree that the zoom scroll is a bit cumbersome, as page jumps occur once you hit the edge of the page. ie. button click at the Right and Bottom of the page will jump to the next page. This Auto-Page jump coupled with the delay that most eReaders have could be frustrating to users who need to zoom and pan pdfs.

If you're creating documents I'd reccommed either PDFs formated for a smaller page size (ie. maybe customized to the device screen) or converting to EPUB (as fonts can be resized dynamically on the reader using EPUB books).

Here are things that i'm hoping are added in the next Firmware:
+ Ability to Jump to specific pages in PDFs
+ An alternative method of zoom and pan

[DannyElfman]

Thanks for the feed back. Do you think it would handle 800pages PDF book formatted for 6" display (167dpi) ?

[lchen]

Yes it should. I've PDFs created from the freely available raw text files from the http://www.ccel.org/ website. Each volume of the Pre-Nicean and Ante-Nicean Fathers is about 1600 Pages. Loads perfectly (although I've to consider a reformatted pdf for the Kobo screen).

Page Turn Speeds are the same as epub books. There’s currently no way to jump to a pdf section, so if you want to get to the middle of the pdf you’ll have to manually turn each page till you get there (maybe this will be changed in the next firmware update). On the plus the eReader does save the last page you were reading.

For PDFs and reference ePUB books (ie. Technical Manuals, Bible, Scholarly Journals) jumping to sections is KEY, as many users would jump to sections in a non-linear way.


Hope that helps. God bless.

[DannyElfman]

Well, thank you very much for this piece of information. It does help me a lot ! I just have to decide myself to order it and have it cross the ocean

[lchen]

Great choice! Hope you enjoy the reader
God willing, there'll be more updates on the firmware in the near future, and hopefully Kobo/Indigo will be able to have the device released in the UK.

Happy Reading Danny.
God bless.

[JCSullivan]

I'll have to look-into creating chapters in the pdf so as it would work like the epub does. A chapter for every 10 pages.
Just thinking out load.

With the USA release this summer (changes better be fast because THAT market can make or break the kobo) the UK and EUR release can't be far behind.

Thinking out load again, how are they going to handle multi-lingual? Did they release kobo in Quebec in English only?

[lchen]

Wow, you're correct, thanks for sharing your thoughts out loud .

I've a PDF that has links in it (ie. Table of contents with PDF links) and it does work like the EPUB sections. So only PDFs that do not have Linked Table of Contents will require the more manual page turns (I'm still requesting a Jump To option in the next firmware release) (for the ccel.org txts, i used openoffice.org to convert them to pdf but didn't put any links in them).

I've not tried loading French Language books, but support for alternative fonts (ie. Cyrillic, Asian, Coptic, Greek, Arabic font sets) would be amazing in the next firmware. All the special characters display perfectly in PDFs (I've seen pdfs using Coptic, Greek and Arabic).

Also agree that the firmware changes should be quick (keep up the amazing work Kobo eReader dev teams!! All the Canadian users are looking forward to the development of this product).

[mfpreach]

Try Calibre to convert, thats what I use.

[steerpike]

Basically a PDF displays on a Kobo but is not able to be read. At full size, the print is tiny and zooming in and panning line by line with a 5 second delay would have my ereader thrown against the wall by page 3. Maybe there is a PDF out there somewhere that is the right size but I have yet to find one. A fail for the Kobo in my book.

You can convert PDFs and I have tried. Usually the line length is set which gives you a one word line every second line. An ereader is about a superior reading performance. so still a fail. I read PDFs on a netbook.

Bottom line - if the Kobo can't get this fixed, they are misleading customers by calling it PDF capable.

While I am in this mood, a few more disappointments are the limited battery life ( two weeks?), of sometimes 2 days. And a dead battery shows up by locking the display AND losing the place 400 pages in to a book - with no way other than page turns to get back to your place. A firmware upgrade is supposed to solve these issues but I have been on their Early Access program for a month now and no word at all.

A Kobo reads epubs fine which is why I have not taken mine back. Fair to say though, after spending NZ$300, I am not thrilled with my purchase.

[sabredog]

In defence of the Kobo somewhat here, not many ereaders can actually display a PDF well at all.

The issue is more or less the PDF file itself.

[HarleyB]

I have read a number of PDF books on my Kobo.
I attempted to convert them to ePubs with Calibre but I was not successful so I read them as PDFs.
I used the landscape mode only available when reading PDFs in the document section and use the whole page setting.
With these settings I need to page down 3 times to get the full page (which does impact on the battery life by increasing the number of pages turns) but I found that for reading novels (so therefore no graphs, diagrams etc) it worked quite well. The books I read all were broken into chapters but as they were novels I just read from start to finish without jumping around.

[3d0g]

Originally Posted by steerpike

Basically a PDF displays on a Kobo but is not able to be read. At full size, the print is tiny and zooming in and panning line by line with a 5 second delay would have my ereader thrown against the wall by page 3. Maybe there is a PDF out there somewhere that is the right size but I have yet to find one. A fail for the Kobo in my book.

PDF = Portable DOCUMENT Format. As documents are usually A4 / Letter sized, things are going to look tiny on a 6" screen. That's physics. The fact the kobo does PDF at all is a bonus. Many eReaders do not. Seek out EPUB content for a better eReading experience.

Originally Posted by steerpike

While I am in this mood, a few more disappointments are the limited battery life ( two weeks?), of sometimes 2 days. And a dead battery shows up by locking the display AND losing the place 400 pages in to a book - with no way other than page turns to get back to your place. A firmware upgrade is supposed to solve these issues but I have been on their Early Access program for a month now and no word at all.

Check your spam filter. The firmware upgrade has been released for all kobo distributions for quite some time. Here's the info directly from Whitcoull's site. With the 1.4 firmware, it's possible to get the advertised 8K page turns. I personally tested it.

[zoran]

I had some time trying out to convert pdf to epub. Calibre is
fine utility for this, but it is not panacea. People start to make
documents in pdf or saving them in pdf as default. Cannot say
why is that. The reason I mention this is that mostly they not
press <enter> in their work. So, there is not hard new line, or
I'm totally wrong. If I'm right, this kind of data is converted
without a hiccup. I have some books reading just as any other.
There is also another kind of pdf documents. They seems to
have new line and the output looks like this:

This is a new line that should show
you how I not
intent to format epub book.

Whatever I try, nothing. Converting this way, another way.
Stays the same. More users have the same problem. If some-
one could point to something better, please, do it.