Quote:
Originally Posted by Obscured
From Kobo's website:
You'll find some differences when you're reading PDF books compared to regular books, including the option to read in landscape orientation, and to zoom in on the page.
Here are some things you can't do with a PDF book:
Select text
Add highlights
Look up words in the dictionary
Change the text size or style
And...add notes
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I am very surprised. One of my most pleasant surprises reading PDFs on Elipsa was that with most good PDFs I COULD look up words in the dictionary.
and I will quote myself
Quote:
Originally Posted by anacreon
Well, my experience with PDFs on Elipsa is mostly much more positive. But one thing to remember always, is GIGO - garbage in garbage out, and too many PDFs are outright garbage, particularly those massively digitalized by Google.
Also, before the advent of the 10.3" Kobo, the first thing I did with PDFs is cropping margins (I have Adobe Acrobat Pro) - which I did a bit too radically at the beginning which I now regret. The second is creating a TOC for that majority of PDFs which have none, or incomplete ones. And for decent otherwise PDFs we now have a perfectible but quite enjoyable way to read PDFs.
Thanks to the stylus, it is now easy to adjust the zoom level - which I found very difficult with my finger. I do hope geek1011 can patch this so we don't have to pan every new page.
And the fact I can now open dictionaries from a word is a big plus.
Kobo's way to deal with landscape reading is also a way around PDFs with ridiculously small pitch and/or pale fonts on grayish ground.
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I'll give a few examples of "good" PDFs that open the dictionary window dictionaries when I press a word and the usual search drop-down list
back/search in book/Wikipedia/Google:
* John Ashbery's "Where Shall I Wander"
* Ian Wood's "The Merovingian Kingdoms"
* "Le Gaffiot 2016 - Dictionnaire Latin Français"
and those searches do work.
"bad" PDFs
* Walter Benjamin's "Correspondence", a translation, one of those PDFs where someone scanned an open paperbook, so 2 pages per PDF page with the darkened center spine visible, which must be read in landscape mode
* "The Ashley Book of Knots", a heavily illustrated book but just photos of each page, well done, page by page, but not searcheable.
* Victor Hugo's "La Légende des Siècles", a typical Google scan, with missing pages here and there which I had to find elsewhere (and the Bodleian librarian I informed of this couldn't have cared less), but I was glad to have it since I couldn't find it anywhere else.
EDIT: I'm criticizing the libraries for allowing Google to do that, but the libraries don't have the means to do it properly, and at least we have sources, however imperfect, for books which would be totally inaccessible otherwise, and whatever I may feel about Google otherwise, I'm thankful for this.