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Nate the great · 09-20-2009, 12:17 AM

I avoided trying a PDF yesterday because I've never liked how any of the dedicated readers handled them. I didn't want a bad experience to negatively impact my opinion. I can sum up the PDF ability in one word:
WANT

If I leave the PDF at the lowest font level I have all the same abilities (zoom, sketch, etc) as the image viewer. This alone would makes the Boox worthwhile. But, it gets better.

The Boox can reflow text at 4 different font sizes. It's very good, so good that I'm going to dig out some of my more complicated PDFs and give it a stress test. The reflow isn't perfect, but it's so good that I'm going to have to do a side by side comparison with a Sony Reader to see which ones better.

Internal links work, and it accepts the external TOC that you sometimes see with PDFs. (Are you drooling yet?)

As I use the PDF viewer more I finally understood what I thought was a bug was in fact a design decision. User defined settings (font size, screen flash, etc) are not set on the device level. They're set for each ebook. Given the diverse range of formats (PDF, Epub, Mobipocket) this was the right choice. Even setting it by format would be bad because PDFs alone vary too much.

to be continued...

09-20-2009, 12:17 AM	#22
Nate the great Sir Penguin of Edinburgh Posts: 12,375 Karma: 23555235 Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: DC Metro area Device: Shake a stick plus 1	PDFs I avoided trying a PDF yesterday because I've never liked how any of the dedicated readers handled them. I didn't want a bad experience to negatively impact my opinion. I can sum up the PDF ability in one word: WANT If I leave the PDF at the lowest font level I have all the same abilities (zoom, sketch, etc) as the image viewer. This alone would makes the Boox worthwhile. But, it gets better. The Boox can reflow text at 4 different font sizes. It's very good, so good that I'm going to dig out some of my more complicated PDFs and give it a stress test. The reflow isn't perfect, but it's so good that I'm going to have to do a side by side comparison with a Sony Reader to see which ones better. Internal links work, and it accepts the external TOC that you sometimes see with PDFs. (Are you drooling yet?) As I use the PDF viewer more I finally understood what I thought was a bug was in fact a design decision. User defined settings (font size, screen flash, etc) are not set on the device level. They're set for each ebook. Given the diverse range of formats (PDF, Epub, Mobipocket) this was the right choice. Even setting it by format would be bad because PDFs alone vary too much. to be continued...