Quote:
Originally Posted by talaivan
I guess that's why the text of imported pdf's is fuzzy. Much better on the Sage. Amazon, please get rid of your software developers and hire a competent start-up to start all over building your software. You can use what you have until they come up with something better, which shouldn't take too long. Really, the software on the Scribe, which is a machine with enormous potential, is atrocious -- no excuse for it.
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It actually looks fine. If the PDF is generated on a computer (as opposed to scanned in with some fixed resolution), it imports in at a resolution that remains sharp at the highest zoom Scribe allows (which seems about 4x).
It's using the same format ('Print Replica') used for many textbooks sold in Kindle Store. The iOS app lets you zoom in even further, and it remains sharp to that zoom level.
If the text isn't sharp it is because the source PDF wasn't sharp (most likely scanned at a resolution that doesn't look good when zoomed in on the Scribe).
Amazon takes the incoming PDF and creates a raster images for each page, at an appropriate resolution for the target device. This raster image is the only thing that gets rendered for display. The text is never rendered, it's just string variables in memory that are associated with a rectangle on the display.
Where we have talked here about 'text layer is not getting read in', it's a metaphor for 'the area of memory which maps text to display coordinates isn't getting populated properly when file is read in'. Or it could be an issue with retrieving data from that area. But when it is fixed it won't look any different.
PDFs are more complex, and require more computation to render them. It requires an entirely separate rendering engine. Some PDFs will even be impossible to render with an eReader and its intentionally limited resources. It's never been a great fit for eReaders. One advantage is that fonts and vector graphics scale up smoothly, but that doesn't confer any advantages on an eReader. It's so you can print large signs and posters without pixelation.
Kobo is stuck with PDF because they do not have the engineering resources to do more than build on top of a third party engine (Adobe). The engine is as optimized as it can be, but it's going to have limits. If all you are doing is markup of small documents, it is probably fine, and well suited for that use case.
But Print Replica is far more lightweight, and won't have non-linear performance issues. It's a good approach for fixed layout content, particularly for Scribe, where there's priority on reducing system resource usage as much as possible.
And my current belief is that Amazon wants Scribe to do more than mark up converted PDF files: they want to give Scribe access to content available in Print Replica format in the Kindle Store (textbooks etc), which should find a market for Scribe with students at all levels, especially with the Notebook features built in.