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Is it true that PDFs with lots of figures and tables and in 8.5x11 page design (again scholarly journal articles) are a lost cause on both and will probably always bee on small ereaders?
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Originally Posted by dmaul1114
I never said I'd mostly use it for Academic PDFs. It would just be a huge plus as it would save me printing so many out since I can't stand reading on a monitor/laptop. But it seems like no device does conversions well for academic PDFs since they're based on 8.5 x 11 pages with lots of tables and figures so it's moot for now.
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I can't think of any academic journals that use 8.5x11 pages. Indeed, the printed part is rarely over (or much over) half that. They may provide their PDFs formatted for
printing using 8.5x11 paper, but usually this means they have large oversized margins, which can be stripped away using Acrobat, or any of number of other .PDF editing tools, many available here at MobileRead.
Those that come even close to 8.5x11 would use multiple columns -- with the right app, you can convert multiple column PDFs to view as single columns without too much trouble. Indeed, once this is done, these are often
easier to read a mobile device than journals that don't use multiple columns.
I use my Sony 505 on, e.g., journal articles from JSTOR all the time. I don't find them difficult to read at all.Indeed, I use my Sony to read academic .PDFs at least as often as I use it for anything else. (I'm a professor.)
It's true that you do usually need to do some things to make them readable, at least if you want tables, mathematical formulae, etc., to be preserved. Between Acrobat, and free programs available here like
PDFLRF,
Rasterfarian,
PDFread,
SoPDF, and
PaperCrop, I can't pretty much always get it in readable form. There's a learning curve here, but after you get a little more experienced with what works best where, it's not so bad.
The only ones I have any significant trouble with are papers sent to me by colleagues
prior to their being professionally type-set or published, and then they are often single-column on 8.5x11 paper. But even those, once you strip the margins and view in landscape mode, are readable by and large, unless they used a smaller-than-average font. (And if not, I usually just ask them for the original word processor or .tex file.)