best reader for mathematical books

[Rastafa]

What is best reader for reading mathematical and physical books in djvu format? I know that some readers support djvu (e.g. Astak EZ), but I don't know if they display mathematical books correctly. I'm affraid there will be problems with equations.

Would 6 inch screen be good for math books or should I buy reader with larger screen? I don't want to spend too much money so I would prefer smaller reader.

I also thought about converting djvu files to another format, but I don't think there is any format as good for math books as djvu.

Thanks for any help.

[FragFrog]

While Calibre is great at converting different text ebooks, it has some problems with equations in my experience. Source format seems to work best with academical texts as far as I can tell, which inevitibly almost always boils down to PDF. A reader with PDF support is thus adviceable, and with reflow issues that generally also means getting a larger reader than 6" - I sometimes read journal articles on my 6" Sony Touch and aside from the few text-based articles this is no great joy with images and graphs appearing on different pages and equations appearing distorted or simply not parsed at all.

Using the original PDF's these issues mostly go away, only to make place for the new issue that to read a two-column PDF I am constantly zooming in and panning.

[brecklundin]

Originally Posted by Rastafa

What is best reader for reading mathematical and physical books in djvu format? I know that some readers support djvu (e.g. Astak EZ), but I don't know if they display mathematical books correctly. I'm affraid there will be problems with equations.

Would 6 inch screen be good for math books or should I buy reader with larger screen? I don't want to spend too much money so I would prefer smaller reader.

I also thought about converting djvu files to another format, but I don't think there is any format as good for math books as djvu.

Thanks for any help.

One mathematician to another, NONE of the current devices will give what you want. Best bet might be the DR1000S but until one of the mfg adopts dedicated scientific/mathematical markup language or even a reader version of Mathematica/Mathcad (or other similar app) it's not going to work as well as a standard textbook.

I can tell you my K1 (a 6" reader) "sucks hind teat" for any papers I have converted...if for no other reason it's too small. I have not bothered to try any books, pointless because the content does not scale well and images, if included, tend to get really inconvenient to look at while trying to follow the text itself...

I would wait another 3-4 months or look at a tablet you can dedicate to the purpose but still odds are the biggest display will be about 13.3" which is smaller than the Plastic Logic reader due out later this year or early next year.

The idea is great but the implementation is simply not there yet, from what I have found anyway.