Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. T
Hi everyone,
My job requires that I read a lot of scientific PDFs. I did a lot of research before purchasing, and read through a lot of the forums. In the end, the EE seemed like the perfect device to help me store, annotate, and share these research articles. I've had my eDGe for about two weeks now, and, I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed.
First the strengths, as I view them, for an academic. The device is light, the tablet offers a lot of functionality (especially email and web access), and the eInk side is very easy to read. Storage, organization, and reading seem easy and intuitive.
The problems I'm having come with annotating the PDFs... the real reason I bought the device. The fact that you cannot read nor annotate in landscape mode is a big challenge. While the eInk screen size is generous as ereaders go, it still isn't the same size as a typical sheet of paper. This becomes problematic as scientific journals are already written using pretty small fonts. I thought, however, that this could easily be overcome by zooming in and scrolling around the pages. (Note: I was aware that reflow of these journals would not work well based on their formatting, but I though I could handle zooming as it would just add a few extra button clicks to read.) What I discovered is that if you zoom in on a document, make annotations (eg, underline a sentence and circle a word), when you scroll down the page or over to the other column, the annotations stay in the same place relative to the screen rather than relative to the words. That is, if you circled a word in the center of the zoomed-in screen, then click to view the right column, the circle stays in the middle of the screen and, therefore, is no longer circling the original word (I apologize if I'm not explaining this well.) For me, this makes the device almost useless for my purposes. I am praying that they get this fixed very quickly. If they're marketing the EE to students (and other academics), this is a major hurdle that has to be overcome quickly.
I would appreciate any suggestions people have for overcoming and/or dealing with this problem. The only thing I've thought to do is read the document at a zoom level where I can see the whole page. This works, but the text is SO SMALL! It is really difficult to read and make useful notes.
Thoughts? Comments?
Thanks!
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This is useful to know, as that's how exactly I plan to use the Edge. It's really unfortunate that it's not usuable as it should be at the moment for marking up pdfs.
Though anotating academic PDFs can be tricky, as it depends how they've been formatted. I've used annotation software on a Windows pc tablet (e.g. Bluebeam PDF Revu), which has sophisticated zooming and I still found it awkward.
When marking up converted MS Word docs as pdfs, it's usually not difficult as font-size & margin spacing is fine. But often, you find on academic pdfs, the text can be natively small and there is not much margin space to hand annotate comments (and instead inserting comments in a box via the pdf software, rather like MS Word comments system, seems easier). Or you zoom in and write comments and then zoom out. But the Edge doesn't have that feature properly working yet. Even if it sorts out landscape rotation, this ends up restricting how much of the article you can see, which is a rather artifical way of reading a (dense academic) document. On a tablet pc, I found zoom in/out for writing comments hassle, and I got impatient when using it as it went against how I interact with pdf articles via quickly scribbling notes and marking up, going back and forth etc. (Of course everyone has their own method of working with texts, so my comments here may not be relevant!)
It makes me wonder if apart from simple highlighting and underlining, properly annotating academc pdfs is ever going to be really practical on e-readers (or tablets). Sure, Edge/other e-readers are great for allowing you to carry huge numbers of academic articles. But for
close reading and interaction with a text and making hand-written markups, whether printed paper pdf and a fine-tiped pen ultimately leads to a simpler life?
Instead of investing in the Edge, I buy a decent light weight 10/12in e-reader (lots of new ones coming on the market) for general pdf reading, and invest in a sheet-feeder scanner/printer and actually re-scan my marked up pdfs....heretical thing to say on an Edge forum
