Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
|
You could get usable text from that if you divided up the columns of the pages individually, which you could do either with PaperCrop or with the Full version of Adobe Acrobat. The problem is mainly that the pages are all different, so you'd have to do each page separately. I don't the problem would be quite as bad with a real article, where it's unlikely to switch column widths over and over again (it might do it on the first page from the rest or something like that). The images and charts that span columns would also need to be manually done. It would be a lot of work to get it in a useable form on a small reader, though it certainly
could be done.