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Originally Posted by ectoplasm
It looks like you don't understand that PDFs are not necessarily scanned images that are OCR'd. Commercial ebook PDFs are almost always created directly from a digital source. There can be no errors and there is no "scanned layer".
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No offense, Mr. Plasmic, but either I failed to make the point of my post clear or you felt it would be utterly delightful to respond without having read it! I suspect you might understand what I mean after reading this bit:
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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
I'm wondering whether we're talking about two different kinds of pdf, in which case the magazine might be illustrative of your experience, while a scanned pdf of a vintage copy of Michelet's Insects from Google Books is illustrative of mine.
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This was my polite way of suggesting that commercial pdfs (like the kind our magazine's post-production team creates) and pdf scans of books (like those on archive.org) are different things, and that reflowing text within a formatted pdf itself was not something I recalled the 350 being able to do.
My suggestion (which was intended to be tactful) was that perhaps the poster was talking about the OCR layer of a scanned pdf and not reflowing the pdf text itself. One of the main reasons publishers like using pdfs is because they can restrict users' access to features like text reflow and selectability. Technically, a pdf creator can set the preferences to allow the user to reflow text, but in practice, most publishers want you simply to increase the size of the document view, which tends not to be practical on an e-ink reader with a relatively small screen.
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The ability to reflow is another thing, which depends on a combination of whether the PDF was tagged, and the capabilities of the reader software. I've found even untagged PDFs can still reflow pretty well for novel type text.
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I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in publishing who didn't know that already. But in practice, I see publishers wanting to restrict users' options as much as possible, and I definitely don't recall being able to reflow any of the pdfs in my library on the 350. That's why I suggested the possibility the poster was looking at a scan layer -- not because all pdfs have one, but because that might have been what that particular poster saw.