[ashkulz]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Advantage: Very straightforward and simple, and you use the Reader modes the way you are accustomed to.
Disadvantage: There was some extra margin on my document on the right side of pages, and you do have to put the Reader in landscape mode, which takes a little time to get out of.

The margin on the right side is inevitable, as PDFRead will resize the image down to the reader dimensions to maintain proper aspect ratio of the cropped page -- very few pages will have a aspect ratio which matches the screen aspect ratio. I had thought of doing a non-aspect ratio preserving resize, but the output tends to be bad on pages having only a few lines: they then expand to take the whole page, making them VERY tall and looks really weird.

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

2) Default/PRS500-L

Advantages: Easiest and best option, in my opinion, based on the one book. There really is some overlap when you do landscape this way, so you don't miss anything. It works great. It rotates the page to the right, so you can turn pages with your right thumb, and it really isn't bad having the cover opening in towards you.

Disadvantages: I think the pages may not be as evenly split as when you let the Reader break pages in half by itself.

As I said earlier, in this mode it will not split evenly at all: taking into consideration the screen dimensions and the aspect ratio of the page content, it will make 2/3/4 pages as needed. You can also rotate it left instead of right, but that option is not in the GUI. You have 2 choices: copy and modify the command line when the conversion process starts (it is shown at the start) or use the batch conversion script and put it in the options. The option to use is "--rotate left"

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Come on - surely there are others out there who are using PDFRead and can give us some tips on how to best make use of the program.

The best news is that you can likely just follow #1 and #2 and get great results for many pdf documents. And there are probably more ways to improve it also, but I like fast and easy! Thanks ashkulz!

I think that for most users, the default profile settings work very well and they rarely bother to do the extra tuning. That's something that I do myself, I rarely bother to change the default settings -- in fact, I'm so lazy that I've written a script which will take all extract all archives in a directory, convert any LIT, TXT, RTF or PDF file to HTML, index all of the HTML files, make an RB ebook and send it across to my ebook. So typically all I do is copy some files to a folder and run the script -- and that's it If you want to see the (linux-specific) script, you can access it here.