[jfontana]

After a lot of thinking, I'm finally considering buying an e-ink based e-reader. The problem is, most of the documents I want to read are in PDF format. I tried an iLiad and the experience was abysmal. With the iLiad you can zoom PDFs but the process is painful and depending on the original font size even when you zoom a document and read it horizontally, the print is too small.

I don't think I want to buy a large size e-reader since all the ones I know of are REALLY too expensive. The question is, is there any trick, application, method that works to read PDFs in an e-ink e-reader without having a totally unpleasant experience? I tried converting my PDFs to ePub or Mobi formats using Calibre but the results were very poor for non-fiction books.

Many of the documents I want to read are academic papers with special characters, formulas, graphics and tables so you can imagine what happens when you convert the original pdf to one of these other formats. Formatting disappears in many cases, characters are misinterpreted and changed, superscripts and subscripts are converted to regular size characters, etc.

So this attempt to obtain reflowable text to improve readability failed miserably. Is there any way to reflow the text in a PDF to increase the size of the font without losing the important information conveyed by special characters and formatting such as italics, superscripts, etc?

Any help you people can offer will be very welcome. If I don't have any other choice, I guess I will wind up buying a large size ereader. Although a little while ago I had the opportunity to read a document with a Kindle DX and I can't say the experience was soo much better: the print continued to be too small for my sight to bear.

JM