Quote:
Originally Posted by Nathanael
I played around with this briefly, too, after getting my first ereader. The problem I ran into is you're still pretty much stuck with a fixed text size. Sure, you can tweak your page size so it displays at a fair size under normal conditions. However, because some days my eyes are better than others (I'm getting too old to pretend my eyes are still young), and I don't always reading in ideal lighting conditions, I've become very dependent on being able to change text size. Two things my current reader (Sibrary G5) does pretty well are text sizes (fourteen steps, from near-microscopic to ginormous -- a dozen words or less per screen), and reflow.
Plus it means I don't have to (re-)create a new PDF for every device I want to read on. The same epub will (depending on the software, of course) look just fine practically anywhere.
--Nathanael |
Off topic? My post was a rebuttle to the comment "some call me tim" made saying PDFs look like poop and the fact so many on MobileRead have made the same assumption about PDFs he did.
I would appreciate it if you wouldn't twist my words around the way you did. The way your quote edited out parts of my post takes two parts of what I was saying out of their original and very different contexes and combined them into a single one. I said I had made two custom sized PDFs so the text size would be an easily read one on my JBL, the only place I plan on ever using them, btw. One of the points I was making was if a PDF page was near the size of the e-book reader's screen, then the font size could be easily set to be easily read (the other being not all PDFs are letter or A4 as many people seem to assume here). Using a larger size PDF page size displayed to fit the screen of a reader can do the same thing if the font is big enough to begin with.
The second part of the quote referred to the p-books I have scanned into PDFs without going through OCR, not the custom ones I first mentioned. The text of most paper back books is around 3 1/4". The screen of my 5" JBL is 3" x 4". The width of the text of a PDF page made from a paper back will easily fit on the screen of the JBL with only a slight reduction in size when in portrait and up to a slight increase in size when in landscape (if I choose to, usually I don't to cut down on scrolling).
I agree almost any e-book format is better than PDF because of the ability to reflow when changing font size. However, in the case of the custom made PDFs of mine, the information in one was in columns so reflow would have been undesireable so I put them in PDEF to lock in the page layout. The second was a phone/address book. Reflow there would also be undesireable. I created both using MS Word so converting either to, say, e-pub would have been easy but that would have defeated my purposes.
In the the case of the books scanned without OCR to PDF... If I had employed OCR, then edited the results, sure, I could have had the ability to change font sizes and have the text reflow accordingly but I just have too many books and not enough time for that. Image type PDFs are the compromise that make the project possible. Again, the point was that not all PDFs are the same large page size.
Btw, I doubt your eyes are much worse, if not better, than my 61 year old peepers. There is a reason I wear trifocals. Life as a Senior is often one of compromise. When away from the house, I will read books that are easy to read on my JBL. The relative few that have too fine a print to comfortably read on the JBL I can comfortably read at home on my 32" TV screen from across the room.