Quote:
Originally Posted by JDługosz
You can download Calibre, convert them in batch, and use the internal reader to see how they turned out.
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The answer will be, "they turned out ghastly". Calibre's PDF conversion is pretty sad. Not that anyone else's is a whole lot better.
As others have said, PDFs are a very poor fit for a small-screen device. PDF is a page-layout specification. It says, in effect, "put this character, in this typeface at this point size, this many inches in and this many inches down". Everything is placed at specific locations in specific sizes.
Most PDF files are built to be viewed at letter/A4 size. If you try to view them at a smaller size, it's not going to be nice. If you try to expand the size, you either end up looking at just a part of the page (zoom/pan, not currently an option with the NOOK), or taking the pieces and trying to fit them together into something that looks like plausible. Unfortunately, the header and footer text doesn't look any different from the main body text. And trying to determine which are the
real line breaks, paragraph breaks, and page breaks, versus which breaks are only there in order to make the text fit the letter/A4 page, is just plain voodoo.
If you've ever tried to copy-and-paste from a PDF, you have some inkling of just how icky it all is. Text from inside of inserts gets copied, section headers are copied out of order from the text, line breaks are kept intact, etc.