New to this tech.. (sony PRS 505)

[fulanito_uk]

Hello all,

I am new to this tech, and well my father has always wanted one and i have never seen the point.. until i asked how much it would cost to print out some Computer manuals from a PDF.. I have a question if in install this PDF onto the SONY PRS 505 will it work of course in b/W but will the images show? and will it take ages to load then (+/- how long?)

Thanks so much for your help!

a sample of the PDF i want to use with the device..

http://www.f-16.net/downloads_file11.html

[amjbrown]

Welcome to the forums fulanito!

I would not recommend the 505 for PDFs - the forums a full of 1,000,000 reasons why. I would strongly recommend it for fiction, but that is not what you are asking!

Some MR contributors have had success with the iRex line, but that is not my area of expertise. The 505 will not deliver you PDF happiness.

Have a browse around, and come back with further questions!

amjb

[fulanito_uk]

thanks for your fast reply.. lucky i did'nt go ahead with my purchase!! so I guess like you said some are better than other for PDF reading... its a shame as the 505 is pretty cheap now days

[orion2001]

Yup, the PRS-505 isn't great for A4/Letter sized PDFs...especially if they have a lot of embedded graphics, etc. Text reflow isn't perfect but it works decently for text only PDFs.

Page turns are actually decent. I loaded in your PDF and it still turned pages fairly quickly. Cropping whitespace and using a tool like SoPDF to split the pages into two also helped but even in landscape mode the font was a bit smaller than what would make for comfortable reading.

It definitely wouldn't be a great device for reading those kinds of PDFs. You would definitely need to look into devices with larger screens such as the Kindle DX or the Iliad.
On the other hand, if you format PDFs to the size of the PRS-505 screen, they work very well. In fact I am currently formatting a lot of my ebooks to PDFs as I like the enhanced typography and type-setting it enables.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by fulanito_uk

a sample of the PDF i want to use with the device..

http://www.f-16.net/downloads_file11.html

Just to check, I put it on my Sony PRS-505.

It's a locked PDF, with correct title/author metadata (yay! So it shows up in the listing as "Battlefield Options: Falcon 4.0..." rather than "F4.0AF.QXD_Fin" or something useless like that), but it's not tagged. However, it seems that in this case, that's okay.

I could read this on the PRS-505; I've read similarly formatted books. (But it's painful, and I'd have to really LOVE what I was reading.) The text is tiny. When I reflow it, it's much more readable, although the formatting is a touch odd. (Not bad, though, because it's very linear. It's just that page headers & footers can wind up on the wrong end of the page.) The section headers become uncomfortably large with the M & L reflow options.

I would read this on the M setting; I suspect that most people would prefer it on the L setting, and just cope with the annoyingly large section headers.

This particular kind of PDF works fine on the PRS-505--but another one, that looked almost identical to the casual reader, might not. It depends on what program it was made in, and what conversion settings were used.

The PRS would work for this, but I wouldn't recommend getting an ebook reader specifically to read this, unless the person (1) checked out one in person first, to make sure the small problems weren't annoying to him, and (2) knew he'd be reading several dozen books formatted exactly the same way.

[fulanito_uk]

Thank you so much for your hard work... I could'nt be even more problematic and ask you to take a picture of what it looks like to get some idea if its worth the investment?

Again many thanks!

[300com]

If you want something especially focused on displaying pdf's,
I wouldn't buy anything at all and wait for at least another 12 months.

This technology has a long way to go.
But it's excellent as it is for reading "text" !