Quote:
Originally Posted by warakawa
what do you mean by reflowed?
|
A PDF is 'page image' style format, that is kind of like a snapshot picture of a books page, not a free flowing text format like LRF or EPUB.
This allows PDF's to exactly control page formating, but when you put a document that is designed for an 8.5 by 11 inch page (or the equivalent metric size) onto a tiny 6 inch screen things get very hard to read.
If you just try to make the text larger, then everything can't fit on the page anymore, so it has to "reflow" onto the following pages.
This works fine for most text only PDFs, but can royally screw up the formatting of some PDF documents by messing up tables, or changing the relationship between text and figures or images.
So by DEFAULT the PRS-x50 readers start out displaying the page at it's standard 'full page' size.
Rather than using the page mode menu to do this LIKE THEY SHOULD, Sony stupidly uses the font size "S".
When you are using "S" the document is like a shunk down full page image, and there is NO REFLOW so, in other words,
everything on the page stays the way it would appear on a full sheet of paper, but smaller.
IN THIS MODE THE SIZE OF THE "S" FONT IS CONTROLLED BY THE DOCUMENTS LAYOUT,
NOT THE READERS FONT SETTINGS.
When you use another setting like "L" or "XS" the reader overrides the fonts.
This means that the font size for "S" setting is set by the PDF file, but the other sizes are set by the reader, so you can have weird situations where the 'S' size doesn't fall between 'XS' and 'M' like it should.
I think it would have been less confusing if Sony had used one of the 'page mode' settings for this, but it is fairly easy to understand once you understand that "S" size for PDFs really means "Turn off any font scaling and use the size in the PDF file"
I think the reason they did it this way is because 'S' is the default font size, so turning off any custom font sizing when 'S' is selected makes sure that when you first load a PDF it is displayed in the native font sizes with full page layout.
There are probably a dozen different ways to do this that would be less confusing as far as setting the options go, but most of the real aggravation comes from the fact that most PDFs are just NOT well designed to be read on a small screen, and do NOT have any graceful way to resize the font so they can be.
I remember reading one really scathing review of the Sony, from someone who basically was upset because they had heard that the Sony did a fairly good job of dealing with PDFs, but they thought it was GARBAGE.
Why? - Well, it seems he was really upset that you couldn't make the fonts "NICE n' BIG" without "messing up the layout".
When it was pointed out to him that you could keep the formatting and make it bigger by ZOOMING IN, he then complained that "Then you have to PAN AROUND!".
So basically what this IDIOT was expecting was that somehow the Sony would magically allow you to make all that tiny text BIGGER
without anything changing position, OR moving around, OR going off the edge of the screen 
So, please understand that the PRS-x50 readers can only do so much with PDFs formatting wise, so if you want documents optimized so that you can change font sizes on the fly - USE EPUB OR LRF
