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Old 04-14-2016, 06:57 AM   #6
kacir
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Posts: 3,463
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Join Date: May 2006
Device: PocketBook 360, before it was Sony Reader, cassiopeia A-20
Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by MarjaE View Post
Many academic articles are published as two-column pdfs that are a pain and a half on small screens.
...
So are there good tools to batch-convert two-column pdfs to more readable formats? Without ocr errors everywhere?

I use Mac OS X on my computer, and Iriver's version of Linux.
Simple answer, no such tools exist and it's very unlikely that any will ever be developed.
How can you say that a described tool doesn't exist? Do you have a complete list of software ever written or something?

Reading journals on a small screen is relatively frequent request.
I personally use softwaer called pdf scissors. It is a small Java script app that works under Windows, Linux or MacOSX.
You cut the article to a series of small cuts - much more readable on a small screen. For example you can cut the left column into 3 pieces and the right one to 3 pieces as well, so pdf scissors will produce 6 "pages" for each processesed page of the multi-page journal.

Also consider using your e-ink reader in landscape. This way even text that is in only one column can become much more readable of you cut away the margins and divide the page into 2-3 landscaep cuts.

Recently I had problem running the pdf scissors software - my browser started to complain that I can't use Java that way ...
So I have downloaded briss. Tehre is even mac version of Briss.
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