Okay, I have a few more details on this new PDF reflow thing from a friend who attended the CES today and was able to secure some specific answers for me.
The reflow is definitely not dependent on the PDF being tagged.
The way it works is to pull all the text out of the file, and reflow that, while moving any pictures to the end of the file -- they're still displayed, just after all the text. I still don't know how they find the ends of lines reliably (they're not handing out code at the booth, apparently
), but evidently they
are doing just that.
It does not OCR or otherwise extract/parse text out of images, so it
won't reflow scans of text, but rather treats them as pictures.
The way it works now, the S setting on the size/zoom button is normal PDF display like we're used to, and either the M or L (exactly which I'm not totally clear on) goes into the reflowed mode.
This suggests a couple of things to me: one, they still have a level left on the size/zoom button that they
could use for cropping, if they chose; two, the reflowing operation may be occurring on the 505 itself, which
could be a bar to the 500 being upgraded with this.
Someone mentioned earlier that the Sony Booth folks had commented that they weren't entirely happy with the speed of the reflow operation, and I'd think that the 500 would be at a disadvantage there due to its lower memory and slower(?) processor. I have it from my friend that they're still saying they'll try to put it on the 500, but they still aren't sure it'll work -- you can salt that to your individual tastes.
NOTE: All of this applies to where they are
now with the function, they're clearly still working on the it, so the whole mess could change in the meantime.
