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tomsem · 08-15-2012, 10:44 PM

Well, I don't remember what it did before in terms of zoom, but prior to 5.1.0 it was pretty useless (no landscape) so I didn't use it much. But there's no way to manually adjust zoom between 100% and 200% now, even after zooming to 200%.

Kindle Touch does have an interesting 'fit-column-to-screen-width' mode that sometimes helps: Double tap and it will zoom the tapped text column to fit the width of the screen (if you only have one column it will trim some of the margin whitespace on each side). Then just use page turn taps to advance to the bottom of the column, then to the next column (or page), etc. This effectively zooms to the zoom levels you'd like to use, and works in either orientation. It does have problems with column detection (tables and graphics) but for many PDFs it is workable.

And for viewing PDF on small screens, it helps to crop whitespace/margins, so the default view isn't wasting so much space.

The Sony PRS-T1 has pretty good PDF support, and allows on-the-fly cropping (automatic and manual). Also PDF reflow FWIW (not much, usually). Zoom is a little smoother as I remember (don't have mine handy at the moment). And of course it will read PDFs with Adobe DRM, should you run into those. You can also draw free-form annotations with the included stylus (I don't think these interoperate with other PDF readers however). I guess you can root it and install Android PDF reading apps also (same is true of Nook Touch).

But any tablet (even 7"-ers) will do a better job with PDF.

08-15-2012, 10:44 PM	#2
tomsem Grand Sorcerer Posts: 6,944 Karma: 27060153 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: USA Device: iPhone 15PM, Kindle Scribe, iPad mini 6, PocketBook InkPad Color 3	Well, I don't remember what it did before in terms of zoom, but prior to 5.1.0 it was pretty useless (no landscape) so I didn't use it much. But there's no way to manually adjust zoom between 100% and 200% now, even after zooming to 200%. Kindle Touch does have an interesting 'fit-column-to-screen-width' mode that sometimes helps: Double tap and it will zoom the tapped text column to fit the width of the screen (if you only have one column it will trim some of the margin whitespace on each side). Then just use page turn taps to advance to the bottom of the column, then to the next column (or page), etc. This effectively zooms to the zoom levels you'd like to use, and works in either orientation. It does have problems with column detection (tables and graphics) but for many PDFs it is workable. And for viewing PDF on small screens, it helps to crop whitespace/margins, so the default view isn't wasting so much space. The Sony PRS-T1 has pretty good PDF support, and allows on-the-fly cropping (automatic and manual). Also PDF reflow FWIW (not much, usually). Zoom is a little smoother as I remember (don't have mine handy at the moment). And of course it will read PDFs with Adobe DRM, should you run into those. You can also draw free-form annotations with the included stylus (I don't think these interoperate with other PDF readers however). I guess you can root it and install Android PDF reading apps also (same is true of Nook Touch). But any tablet (even 7"-ers) will do a better job with PDF. Last edited by tomsem; 08-15-2012 at 11:01 PM.