I'm not Cosmo, but I've looked at several Coast Guard study guides in PDF. These are old (12-15 year old) books that were scanned and saved in PDF format. Even printed they look like a several-generation xerox copy--kind of fuzzy and blotchy. But surprisingly they are very readable on my DXG, especially in landscape mode. Some have two columns of text and lots of photos and charts. PDFs that are actually created from text, as opposed to being scanned images, look terrific. BTW, as far as PDFs go, most of the ones I read are technical and/or scientific in genre. So yes the DXG works great for technical PDFs.