MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - A4 PDFs - tips, tricks, and a call to the community

alex_d · 12-10-2006, 07:12 PM

I've been playing with the reader for a bit, and it seems to me that the problem with A4 pdf display isn't so much the screen size or the paper size or all that benefit-of-the-doubt stuff... it's just bad font rendering. It's not bold enough and the antialiasing does more harm than good. Even plain, blocky, aliased letters look much more readable on the Reader at small font sizes.

I think what happens is that the Reader's pdf viewer tries to use antaliasing to render the fonts most 'faithfully'. But at small font sizes it ends up turning a blocky letter with sharp contrast into a little mess of grayscale. On the reader's 4-bit screen it, first of all, works poorly. But then the real kick in the pants comes when within seconds the eInk begins to unsettle and those very subtle antialiased letters lose their subtleness. Seriously, you can see the text looking half-decent after you just flip a page and then pretty quickly lose its lustre as the white in the page also loses a bit of clarity. (Sony... cut the "look...no electricity!" crap and start giving us the option to actively maintain the image!)

I hate sony. I love the eInk, but sony always royally messes up the software. It tries to pull an Apple by not giving you any options and only grandma-approved features, but then can't even do that right. The only hope I have for the reader is that the modding community will pick up the ball.

Possible solutions:
Hack to fix font rendering on the Reader
Hack to actively refresh the Reader display (useful in combo with other solutions)
Converter to rasterize PDFs (and do the text-cleanup on the PC... plus it can get rid of whitespace and of course speed up viewing)

Right now, I'm investigating that last option. I've tried several utilities but none do it right. FINALLY I had some success with imagemagick (you also need to install ghostscript). Right now I got it to put out .pngs without any antialiasing, and it is MUCH more readable. Still ugly... but it doesn't make your eyes pop out. I have to tune it a lot more and create some script that turns the images back into a pdf. It would also be nice to substitute a custom font (one of those DOS fonts optimized for consoles). Imagemagick does, though, seem to have a huge wealth of options and potential. Custom programs accessing ghostscript or another pdf rasterizer library directly would probably be even more powerful.

I'll update as I play with this some more, but it seems the holy grail of reading A4 pages on the reader is a step closer.

Also, I'll try to post some example files ASAP

Does anyone have any other advice on the matter?

12-10-2006, 07:12 PM	#1
alex_d Addict Posts: 303 Karma: 187 Join Date: Dec 2006 Device: Sony Reader	A4 PDFs - tips, tricks, and a call to the community I've been playing with the reader for a bit, and it seems to me that the problem with A4 pdf display isn't so much the screen size or the paper size or all that benefit-of-the-doubt stuff... it's just bad font rendering. It's not bold enough and the antialiasing does more harm than good. Even plain, blocky, aliased letters look much more readable on the Reader at small font sizes. I think what happens is that the Reader's pdf viewer tries to use antaliasing to render the fonts most 'faithfully'. But at small font sizes it ends up turning a blocky letter with sharp contrast into a little mess of grayscale. On the reader's 4-bit screen it, first of all, works poorly. But then the real kick in the pants comes when within seconds the eInk begins to unsettle and those very subtle antialiased letters lose their subtleness. Seriously, you can see the text looking half-decent after you just flip a page and then pretty quickly lose its lustre as the white in the page also loses a bit of clarity. (Sony... cut the "look...no electricity!" crap and start giving us the option to actively maintain the image!) I hate sony. I love the eInk, but sony always royally messes up the software. It tries to pull an Apple by not giving you any options and only grandma-approved features, but then can't even do that right. The only hope I have for the reader is that the modding community will pick up the ball. Possible solutions: Hack to fix font rendering on the Reader Hack to actively refresh the Reader display (useful in combo with other solutions) Converter to rasterize PDFs (and do the text-cleanup on the PC... plus it can get rid of whitespace and of course speed up viewing) Right now, I'm investigating that last option. I've tried several utilities but none do it right. FINALLY I had some success with imagemagick (you also need to install ghostscript). Right now I got it to put out .pngs without any antialiasing, and it is MUCH more readable. Still ugly... but it doesn't make your eyes pop out. I have to tune it a lot more and create some script that turns the images back into a pdf. It would also be nice to substitute a custom font (one of those DOS fonts optimized for consoles). Imagemagick does, though, seem to have a huge wealth of options and potential. Custom programs accessing ghostscript or another pdf rasterizer library directly would probably be even more powerful. I'll update as I play with this some more, but it seems the holy grail of reading A4 pages on the reader is a step closer. Also, I'll try to post some example files ASAP Does anyone have any other advice on the matter?