Quote:
Originally Posted by wallcraft
Go to SciAm Digital and click on "Learn More" in the Subscribe box. This brings up a page with the 20-page PDF sample, which is essentially a PDF of the print magazine. The sample includes a background image on some pages, lots of illustrations and sidebars, and varied page layouts. |
For an ebook reader, it's a mess.
I could read it on the PRS-505 without editing, but it'd involve some eyestrain. (If I loved the magazine, I'd read it that way.) It reflows the article text okay, but the formatting goes a bit crazy, especially for pages like the table of contents. (And often, the article text appears before the article headers.)
Aside from the fact that it's locked (which is easy to fix if you have the right software, and impossible otherwise), it's a nightmare to reformat. There's not enough whitespace around the edges to make much difference if it were cropped, and the columns aren't neatly organized in twos or threes; some pages have those, and some have text in squares, and some have text/picture combos that will be hard to convert to good ebook formats. Saving it as Word or HTML still winds up with weird line breaks and headers and footers mixed in with other content. Converting to other ebook formats would keep the scrambled text unless someone wanted to spend a couple of hours reformatting.
The only comfortable way to read such PDFS is on a computer or a large-screen device.