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Originally Posted by oliverbogler
The quick answer is that at the moment PDFs that can be cropped aggressively are just readable. Ones that cannot, border on the unreadable, IMO and with my eyes (just turned 40 and everything is getting blurrier...).
Croppability depends on the source of the pdf - most journals allow it, but for example, Nature ones do not. If you have a specific example in mind, please send it to me or post it, and I can try it and upload a photo.
Reflow would be better, and would work great for some journals. I tried this with a random sample of the pdfs I have of scientific papers, and it only worked with a very few - those that provide a pdf of the typesetting information, I guess. Many however have pdfs that are images of a page. (The ones I reflowed, were exportable to html and thence to a word processor and could be made into a more readable document, but that took as long as it might to read half the paper - so not a good time investment.) If the iLiad PDF viewer gains reflow capability, that would be great - but only in a few cases. Zoom is likely to be more useful - a key would be to have good navigation around the zoomed document.
For me the cropping works best, and I can now read papers on a plane, or anywhere, and can carry hundreds with me, and not have to print and waste time, paper and ink. The 16 grays do make a difference, as does the size, when compared to Sony.
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Thank you for your thoughtful and thorough response to my query. You seem to indicate that cropping makes most pdfs readable. I am uncertain how to crop pdfs but I will give it a try - I would agree that zoom would be okay if, for example you could easily move from the bottom to the top of subsequent columns on a page, much like you would move your eyes if reading the paper version of a column formatted document. I have no idea if this feature would be encoded in the browsing device or in the pdf itself. I am very much hoping that the iLiad will prove useful as a pdf reader - based on your comment, it seems you are making it work for you - I know that many of my grad students and colleagues would definitely find this device useful in handling the virtual landslide of published manuscripts that constantly require our attention each day.