Thread: Reading large PDF files
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Old 12-06-2007, 11:46 AM   #7
daudi
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Quote:
Originally Posted by the_apotheosis View Post
How about page-turn times? Since the file is so long, I probably have to make many page turns before getting to the page I want. Considering that it takes ~1-2 seconds for an e-ink screen to refresh (Sony Reader), then does it take around ~3 seconds to turn a pdf page?
You can click on the page progress bar at the bottom of the page to go forward or backwards many pages at a time, you don't have to turn each page to get to the one you want.

Also I have experimented a little with adding elements to pdf pages to improve navigation. You know how some large books or address books have cut-outs at the side (e.g. the moleskine address book), or are perhaps coloured right to the edge of the page so that you can see different sections by looking at the spine. It is possible to emulate this with PDFs by adding hyperlinks with discreet numbers or even labels in the right-hand margin that are repeated on every page of the pdf. It does not add much to the file size. It is a bit like having a clickable table of contents available on every page (but without the long titles).

I have a script that processes a PDF and adds these marks. It is not ready for others to use (unless they are happy editing bash scripts). It also kills any existing hyperlinks which is a shame. But if you have scanned PDFs it could work nicely for navigating between sections of a large PDF. I need to find time to finish this off. Ah, Christmas is coming . . .

There are other things that could be done with this. I was thinking this could be used to create a hyperlink index. The idea would be to supply a list of words to index, use pdftohtml -xml and some scripting to get the page number that has each word, then create an index that is added to the PDF with the index entries and with numbers that are hyperlinks for each page where the word occurs. Not exactly a search option, but a way of pre-processing PDFs to make it easier to find specific items of interest.

I have also used this to create hyperlink thumbnails of each page of the PDF.
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