So coming to this PDF posting I have been promising for 2 days now.
First:
PB firmware has two different apps to view PDFs: The imaginatively titled pdfviewer, an open source viewer and Adobe Reader that's part of ADE. The differences between those viewers are quite subtle but existant.
pdfviewer is fast for a PDF viewer (sorry, couldn't help myself there
), reliable and works great with fiction (some pictures are not rendered that well, especially technical ones)
Adobe Reader has been elegantly tweaked by the PB folks to work well on such a small acreage and behaves well, but sometimes needs a little time to think between pages (1-2 secs, especially with graphically heavy pages) and does not always do the margin cropping quite as good as the pdfviewer! You may freely choose between both of these apps for non DRMed files, Adobe Reader is the default, reader, though
Both apps have essentially 4 zoom options that can be fine tuned further.
1 Normal view:
This view begins with a 100% view of the centered page. PB does not try to cram one whole page on one screen, one just scrolls down to see the rest of the page (done with the navigational cross). A fine dotted line shows where the earlier view was limited. In this Normal view, you may increase or decrease the zoom percentage in 5 percent steps until the page looks right to you. PDF pages that are not reflowed are essentially scrolled, changing to the next page when the first page has been scrolled all the way down!
2 A zoomout option shows 4 or nine pages in a miniature way. You can navigate between those pages and open them to normal view.
3 A view where the side margins are entirely cropped. pdfviewer is faster to achieve this, Reader is sometimes a bit squeamish!
4 Reflow: Reflow works fine for both apps. As usual, pdfviewer is a bit faster, Reader includes pics better. Reflow retains the font and paragraphs of the original text, finer layout features are lost. In this view, the pages are turned normally. Gaps between pages may appear!
A fifth option lets you read PDFs with columned text column by column, zooming out the column text to screen width and jumping from the end of one column to the beginning of the second.
The zoom options and place are saved and maintained through the document.
I will upload here some more extreme tech texts that I downloaded from the Internet. These texts were formatted in a big format for a PC screen, so the size limits of the 360 are most apparent here. I think I found a very acceptable way to read those texts on the 5" screen:
Normal landsape view (MS text on Silverlight)
Some more Silverlight with a Reflow screenshot mixed in
Of course, teachings on color are best read on the PC screen
I chose those PDFs according to Midnight Run's suggestions here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=50
On the german part of my diary, I have uploaded some screenshots from a randomly chosen PDF fiction book (The Brass Bed, freely available from Suvudu) Here the 360 really shines:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=63
And a few column shots:
Random text from Pulpgen (no I do NOT hate women!)
http://www.pulpgen.com
Sorry for the really disgustingly appalling font
Ray Gun Revival 54 (I absolutely positively love that free mag)
freely downloadable at:
www.raygunrevival.com All 54 mags full of space opera glory!