A few comments about scanned books and the software update.
About 1400 copies of the scanned books I cropped for the Iliad were
downloaded to about 100 IP addresses. See earlier post above.
Books are available at:
http://djm.cc/dmoews.html - scroll
to bottom of page.
The zoom function in ver 2.7 makes cropping less necessary. It's
often possible to zoom in just enough to eliminate the white space
around the text - the zoom is maintained through page turns and can
serve as a kind of margin selection. Landscape in the new operating
system is not as useful as it might be. In the Sony reader landscape
shows the top half of the page and a page turn shows the bottom half.
In the Iliad panning is required for every page. Also in the Sony the
display space taken up by the operating system turns to landscape as
well making a wider display. In fact the Sony display in landscape is
wider than the Iliad display in portrait.
I find that books that I already scanned at 600 dpi display quite well
on the Iliad. The only problem is that the files are large.
For example I have scanned in a humorous History of the US
from the 19th century - (the Mayflower is shown covered with furniture)
Bill Nye's History of the United States, Bill Nye, illus. F. Opper.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1894. PDF (22M)
http://djm.cc/library/Bill_Nyes_Hist..._US_edited.pdf
The book was scanned to tif's - bit maps - at 600 dpi - and the files converted to
a pdf. It contains many illustrations and, as it was well preserved,
scanned well. The page size is about 5.2 by 8.1 inches but the text blocks
are only 3.6 x 5.9 inches. Using the new zoom command the text can be shown
at full size and the zoom maintained on paging. The figures can be
enlarged and as they were originally done at 600 dpi show well at larger
sizes.
I've use a hand lens to have a closer look at scanned text and it seems to me
that the algorithm used by the Iliad results in anti-aliasing for scanned text.
Scanned text at 600 bpi is often very well done by the Iliad.
I took a bit of text, an "and" from a page 3.5 x 5.0 inches scanned at 600 bpi
and photographed it as displayed on the Iliad and also on the Sony reader.
Both displays show the characters a bit larger than the original - Sony's display
in landscape is similar to the Iliad in portrait - I also converted the original
tif - a bitmap - of the "and" to a pdf for comparison and photographed the same
"and" slightly zoomed on the Iliad.
A millimeter scale was overlayed on the displays - the small divisions are
0.1 mm. The Sony display and the Iliad display are quite different. The Sony
display algorithm seems to have downsized to a bitmap - the pixels are either
on or off. The Iliad display, appears to me at least, to have downsized with
some anti-aliasing. The original "and" on the paper was about 4.4 mm wide, on
the Iliad picture, Iliad-small, and the Sony reader picture it is about 5 mm wide, and
on the zoomed Iliad picture - Iliad-large - it is about 6 mm wide.
Any comments ? Can anyone comment on the Iliad display algorithm ?