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Originally Posted by Syldaril
I suspect that the Reader, in an attempt to downsample and shrink the original pages, adds considerable degradation to the pdf.
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This is a bit misleading: PDF's simply don't work well on screens of a different size than that for which the files were produced -- PDF is after all a page-description language. If the files you have were made for letter sized pages with, say, 300 dpi print quality, viewing them on a half-sized screen, and with half that resolution is just not a good idea.
It's even worse if your PDF's contain image files, because then you have an image sampling to take into account.
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... how should I manipulate my original pdfs in order to improve legibility on the reader? Would it help to resize them to 800x600 and/or downsample them to 170dpi?
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If the files are image-type PDFs, forget it. You can't improve anything. Resampling the images will only lose information and legibility. You could,
perhaps, cut the images up into Reader-sized chunks and arrange them in reading order, but that will be a lot of work.
For typeset PDFs, downsampling is not possible. Rescaling may be possible, but it won't do anything -- as the PDF reader will scale everything to fit the Reader screen anyway, there won't be much change. Instead you need to change the relative text size on the page. Try to crop unneeded margin space (using Acrobat Professional, and the Tools | Advanced Editing | Crop Tool). That allows the Reader to make the text block relatively larger on the screen. But even then, it will be 'good' only of the remaining text block doesn't containing material that was produced for higher resolution than, say, 150 dpi. If the text was quite small already on the original full-size print, you're unlikely to see much improvement.
The alternative is to read pages half at a time in landscape mode -- I'm fairly certain this is possible on the Reader. See your manual for the magic key button press sequence to do that.
I've been using the iLiad for some time, which has many similarities to the Sony Reader: the only PDF files that are anywhere near decent to read on this device are those created for its particular screen size. Anything else, I read on a full-page computer screen or print out.