Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem
Hmm. Everyone agrees that printing is a waste, yet so many PDFs are still formatted for letter / A4 sized paper, as if everybody is going to print it. Why does this convention still rule?
Wouldn't it be smarter to format the PDF page size a wee bit smaller (e.g. 6"x8", more book sized) so it will work better on a iPad sized screen? This would obviate the need for a larger screen and all that entails (power consumption, bulk, faster processor). This would also be friendlier for facing page viewing on laptop and many smaller desktop displays, which tend to be too short to display letter/a4 size at 100%.
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Well for many scholarly journal articles (including one's I've written) smaller size is hard as we need room for big tables and figures to fit all on one page. It's sometimes a challenge even in A4--and especially in the journals that do have smaller formats, to make good tables with all the relevant information from multivariate statistical models etc.
But in any case, I'm stuck needing a bigger screen tablet if I'm going to stop printing, as even if journals shrunk size in the future, I still spend as much or more time reading past research rather than new research and they won't go back and resize all those old articles. Most are just PDFs that are scanned images anyway, especially for old articles pre dating the adoption of the PC which don't have electronic versions of the original text.