Quote:
Originally Posted by termn8er
So if I can use one of the huge number of PDF readers that work with MS, Linux and Mac and all are able to resize, I don't get why someone can't create a program to work on one of these readers that can do the same thing and read PDF in its native format, vs. trying to translate it.
|
What the "resize" function does is magnify the page exactly as it would appear in a paper book (say). You then pan around the screen to read the magnified text. As you say, it is relatively easy to magnify the page, and small devices like the iPhone and PDAs do this reasonably successfully, but the problem on EInk devices is that a page refresh takes about 1 second. So panning is difficult to do. With the most recent EInk controllers, it might be possible to do a better pan and zoom implementation for PDFs - but the current implementations are not good.
The other approach that is available is to off-line split each page into a fixed number of images. This is like panning to a known set of locations on the page. There are several tools described on these forums for doing this, for example
PDFRead. Another tool is
soPdf, which I think actually preserves the original PDF text (rather than rendering everything as images).