Quote:
Originally Posted by mercury7
Thanks for the reply, Harry!
I did a quick test. - Printed out an A4 page in 12pt Times with .25 inch margins.
- Then I put it in the copier and reduced it to 57% of the original.
- I then printed out a few more pages at various font sizes for comparison.
The results:
12pt Times gets translated into about 7.3pt. That's still readable! If the A4 page was published at 14pt or larger (I hear there is an option to buy some books in a large-print format) it would be even more viable.
Granted, 7.3pt is pretty dang small, but in a pinch, it would be fine to read -- at least, while my eyes are young.
Conclusion:
It wouldn't be a good idea for every book, but for some that only come in PDF, this would work just fine. |
A thing to bear in mind is that the screen has a relatively low resolution - 166dpi. 7pt text will not be as clearly readable on the screen as it will be on the photocopied page.
You're right, though - there are documents it'll be OK for, but there are others that it won't. Just have to try it and see. There are things you can do to improve it, such as cropping the document to remove the margins, which will mean that you can make the text a little larger.