The Edge- from a grad student's perspective

rdblots · 09-27-2011, 11:52 AM

Hi everybody,

I have been mostly lurking on this forum for about a month and a half now, as I started frantically searching for information about the (pocket) edge after I found woot's sale at the end of June. I made the purchase that day, and I have been very appreciative of the information that I have picked up from this message board (I also bought a full sized edge recently).

I thought I would try 2 things: 1) give back a little bit by talking about my experience with the device, and 2) start a discussion that could help the student population that uses this device, since, apparently, that was one of the demographics Entourage was shooting for. While there is a ton of info on this site, sometimes it gets overwhelming to find exactly what I need, so I thought this could be a good summary/q&a thread for students.

I was interested in a tablet and/or e-reader for mostly academic/productivity reasons. As somebody that had a laptop held together by duct tape for a period of time, style points don't mean a ton for me. Also, I always manage to find new ways to waste time, so gaming/entertainment consumption was not a primary concern. Through my school's library, I was able to test out an Ipad 2, a Kindle DX, and a new Nook. I liked the e-ink technology a lot, and I absolutely hate wasting so much paper printing academic papers, ending up with thousands of printed pages laying around my apartment/office completely disorganized. So I was leaning more towards a straight-up e-reader style. The Kindle DX was excellent because it had a big enough screen where I did not feel like I was straining my eyes to read a pdf page on it. The problem- $400 is a little too much for me. So began my quest to find something to meet my needs. That's where the Edge came in.

The academic papers that I read always have a good amount of equations, with many tables/figures/graphs included. So, the word reflow available doesn't really work for my purposes.

How I read academic pdfs on the PE:
1) I use the briss PDF tool to cut each page into thirds. The briss makes this a reasonably painless and quick task (45 seconds per paper, tops). Also, briss doesn't need to be installed, so you can just carry it around with you on a thumb drive or store it on dropbox and download it if you're on a school computer. Very easy. I also typically have some overlap between the 3 sections of the page so that I don't have to go back and forth to re-read the last sentence on the previous page.
2) I then upload the cropped PDF to dropbox, download it to the PE library, flip it to landscape mode, and begin reading. Sadly, the landscape mode does not allow for annotations.
3) I can keep a journal open simultaneously and write notes while I'm reading. I can also attach a USB keyboard and type notes into Evernote on the Tablet side while I read the pdf.
4) The attaching notes option is very interesting, especially when combined with the option to have a USB keyboard to type these notes. I like this concept in general, however, I do not like that if I attach attach notes to the PDF on the Edge, the only place I will be able to access them is on the Edge. I am not prepared to make the Edge my singular work station because when this Edge craps out, whenever that may be, it means I will no longer be able to access the attached notes.
5) Once I'm done with a pdf, I email my journal as a pdf to Evernote attached to the note that I just typed about the pdf.

*** If there is a way that I could see Edge attached notes to pdfs on other platforms, I would be very grateful for descriptions on how to do this ****

How I read academic pdfs on the EE:
1) No cropping necessary. I move the pdf from my Endnote library to dropbox, download to EE via dropbox, zoom sufficiently, and I'm good to go.
2) I tend to zoom in such that there are not any margins. So annotations are usually not terribly useful. However, I do use the paintbrush with yellow color, medium thickness, .4 opaqueness to highlight, and with the "ruler" setting. I find this works better than the highlighting system on the Edge because I can save these highlights as a pdf so that they are viewable on other platforms.
3) See 3) and 4) from above.
4) Once I'm done with a pdf, I send journal as a pdf, email the annotated (i.e.- highlighted) pdf pages to Evernote, attach everything to the note I typed while reading the pdf. I choose to only email the annotated pages because they tend to be large files (I guess because they're saving as photos?) and I do not want to waste so much space doing that.

*** If anybody knows of a way to decrease the hard drive space that annotated pages take up, I would like to know. The way it stands now, I find that an annotated page typically takes more than 10X the hard drive space a usual pdf page does. This is probably a combination of the annotations and the fact I'm zoomed in, but I would be curious if there is a more efficient way to deal with this. Minor, but useful thing I would like to change ***

Apps that I use:
1) Dropbox- this is very useful to move pdfs from my laptop/computer I am using to the Edge
2) Evernote- very solid notetaking software that syncs over multiple platforms
Supposedly I can use OneNote on Windows to edit journal entries (with the right program), but I have not tried this yet. Evernote is excellent because I can tag things in a useful way that makes organization easy for me (and I need all the help I can get), and the syncing across platforms is extraordinarily useful.
3) EZpdfreader- If I want to look at tables that are at the end of a paper while I'm reading on the eink side, ezpdfreader is great for doing this on the tablet side.

For general productivity purposes, I also synced my gmail and google calendar to the system mail and calendar apps, and this has worked well.

Alright, this is all I have for now. Questions (or answers to my questions!) are appreciated, and I will try to make anything I put in here more clear if something is not. Feel free to add on with your student oriented uses and hopefully we can all learn something from each other.

OH...one last thing about the Edge pen: I took apart an old, thick ink pen, stuffed the inside with cotton balls, did some modifications (sorry for being vague), put the pen that comes with the Edge inside of it, rigged it back together with tape, and it works fantastically. Having a thicker pen is much better for writing: it's more comfortable for the hand and it is easier to write. You can definitely find a $30 "real size" pen on ebay or elsewhere, but I think anybody that has an extra thick pen that screws apart can easily modify it into a useful Edge pen. Good luck!

obsessed2 · 09-27-2011, 03:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rdblots

*** If there is a way that I could see Edge attached notes to pdfs on other platforms, I would be very grateful for descriptions on how to do this ****

This is bugging me because I know there is a post in the Entourage Forum Archive regarding this very subject. I'm still searching for it, however here is what I did find.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=137917

This is the link discussing the subject: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&highlight=pdf

You might also find this interesting:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=137466

jamina1 · 09-28-2011, 08:55 AM

Here's a quick question for you - have you upgraded to the 2.2 operating system?
Since I upgraded to Ermine I can't attach web pages to my ebooks or journals like the help video says I should be able to.

obsessed2 · 09-28-2011, 10:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jamina1

Here's a quick question for you - have you upgraded to the 2.2 operating system?
Since I upgraded to Ermine I can't attach web pages to my ebooks or journals like the help video says I should be able to.

Yes you should. I have attached a couple of procedures which might help.

rdblots · 09-29-2011, 02:14 PM

Thanks, Obsessed. It is good to know that people that know what they are doing are working on these issues. Just to be clear, I would actually be perfectly content with the ability to see the notes that I attach on the Edge on other platforms.

I think this is a slightly different issue than the annotations problems because what I would like is when I 1) attach a note on the ereader side, 2) select the text to attach, 3) type the note on the tablet side, and I would like to be able to see that note on other platforms. Actually, in an ideal world, I would like to be able to attach a note from Evernote to specific text (like how one can attach a webpage), but I am not sure how feasible this is.

I really know nothing with regards to the development side of this, but I feel like the issue with attached notes should not really that difficult since attaching a note on the Edge is like making a comment in Adobe. Perhaps it is just more complicated than that.

Also, I have not actually tried the OneNote conversion software yet. I have it downloaded, and I can definitely see some benefits from that, especially since I just discovered a math input editor on Windows 7 that converts handwritten math into typed equations. So I plan to play around with this more in the near future. I'll report back here with anything I find.

09-27-2011, 11:52 AM	#1
rdblots Member Posts: 11 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2011 Device: pocket edge, full sized edge	The Edge- from a grad student's perspective Hi everybody, I have been mostly lurking on this forum for about a month and a half now, as I started frantically searching for information about the (pocket) edge after I found woot's sale at the end of June. I made the purchase that day, and I have been very appreciative of the information that I have picked up from this message board (I also bought a full sized edge recently). I thought I would try 2 things: 1) give back a little bit by talking about my experience with the device, and 2) start a discussion that could help the student population that uses this device, since, apparently, that was one of the demographics Entourage was shooting for. While there is a ton of info on this site, sometimes it gets overwhelming to find exactly what I need, so I thought this could be a good summary/q&a thread for students. I was interested in a tablet and/or e-reader for mostly academic/productivity reasons. As somebody that had a laptop held together by duct tape for a period of time, style points don't mean a ton for me. Also, I always manage to find new ways to waste time, so gaming/entertainment consumption was not a primary concern. Through my school's library, I was able to test out an Ipad 2, a Kindle DX, and a new Nook. I liked the e-ink technology a lot, and I absolutely hate wasting so much paper printing academic papers, ending up with thousands of printed pages laying around my apartment/office completely disorganized. So I was leaning more towards a straight-up e-reader style. The Kindle DX was excellent because it had a big enough screen where I did not feel like I was straining my eyes to read a pdf page on it. The problem- $400 is a little too much for me. So began my quest to find something to meet my needs. That's where the Edge came in. The academic papers that I read always have a good amount of equations, with many tables/figures/graphs included. So, the word reflow available doesn't really work for my purposes. How I read academic pdfs on the PE: 1) I use the briss PDF tool to cut each page into thirds. The briss makes this a reasonably painless and quick task (45 seconds per paper, tops). Also, briss doesn't need to be installed, so you can just carry it around with you on a thumb drive or store it on dropbox and download it if you're on a school computer. Very easy. I also typically have some overlap between the 3 sections of the page so that I don't have to go back and forth to re-read the last sentence on the previous page. 2) I then upload the cropped PDF to dropbox, download it to the PE library, flip it to landscape mode, and begin reading. Sadly, the landscape mode does not allow for annotations. 3) I can keep a journal open simultaneously and write notes while I'm reading. I can also attach a USB keyboard and type notes into Evernote on the Tablet side while I read the pdf. 4) The attaching notes option is very interesting, especially when combined with the option to have a USB keyboard to type these notes. I like this concept in general, however, I do not like that if I attach attach notes to the PDF on the Edge, the only place I will be able to access them is on the Edge. I am not prepared to make the Edge my singular work station because when this Edge craps out, whenever that may be, it means I will no longer be able to access the attached notes. 5) Once I'm done with a pdf, I email my journal as a pdf to Evernote attached to the note that I just typed about the pdf. * If there is a way that I could see Edge attached notes to pdfs on other platforms, I would be very grateful for descriptions on how to do this How I read academic pdfs on the EE: 1) No cropping necessary. I move the pdf from my Endnote library to dropbox, download to EE via dropbox, zoom sufficiently, and I'm good to go. 2) I tend to zoom in such that there are not any margins. So annotations are usually not terribly useful. However, I do use the paintbrush with yellow color, medium thickness, .4 opaqueness to highlight, and with the "ruler" setting. I find this works better than the highlighting system on the Edge because I can save these highlights as a pdf so that they are viewable on other platforms. 3) See 3) and 4) from above. 4) Once I'm done with a pdf, I send journal as a pdf, email the annotated (i.e.- highlighted) pdf pages to Evernote, attach everything to the note I typed while reading the pdf. I choose to only email the annotated pages because they tend to be large files (I guess because they're saving as photos?) and I do not want to waste so much space doing that. * If anybody knows of a way to decrease the hard drive space that annotated pages take up, I would like to know. The way it stands now, I find that an annotated page typically takes more than 10X the hard drive space a usual pdf page does. This is probably a combination of the annotations and the fact I'm zoomed in, but I would be curious if there is a more efficient way to deal with this. Minor, but useful thing I would like to change *** Apps that I use: 1) Dropbox- this is very useful to move pdfs from my laptop/computer I am using to the Edge 2) Evernote- very solid notetaking software that syncs over multiple platforms Supposedly I can use OneNote on Windows to edit journal entries (with the right program), but I have not tried this yet. Evernote is excellent because I can tag things in a useful way that makes organization easy for me (and I need all the help I can get), and the syncing across platforms is extraordinarily useful. 3) EZpdfreader- If I want to look at tables that are at the end of a paper while I'm reading on the eink side, ezpdfreader is great for doing this on the tablet side. For general productivity purposes, I also synced my gmail and google calendar to the system mail and calendar apps, and this has worked well. Alright, this is all I have for now. Questions (or answers to my questions!) are appreciated, and I will try to make anything I put in here more clear if something is not. Feel free to add on with your student oriented uses and hopefully we can all learn something from each other. OH...one last thing about the Edge pen: I took apart an old, thick ink pen, stuffed the inside with cotton balls, did some modifications (sorry for being vague), put the pen that comes with the Edge inside of it, rigged it back together with tape, and it works fantastically. Having a thicker pen is much better for writing: it's more comfortable for the hand and it is easier to write. You can definitely find a $30 "real size" pen on ebay or elsewhere, but I think anybody that has an extra thick pen that screws apart can easily modify it into a useful Edge pen. Good luck!

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09-28-2011, 08:55 AM	#3
jamina1 Connoisseur Posts: 81 Karma: 14 Join Date: Jul 2010 Device: Entourage Pocket eDGe	Here's a quick question for you - have you upgraded to the 2.2 operating system? Since I upgraded to Ermine I can't attach web pages to my ebooks or journals like the help video says I should be able to.

09-29-2011, 02:14 PM	#5
rdblots Member Posts: 11 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2011 Device: pocket edge, full sized edge	Thanks, Obsessed. It is good to know that people that know what they are doing are working on these issues. Just to be clear, I would actually be perfectly content with the ability to see the notes that I attach on the Edge on other platforms. I think this is a slightly different issue than the annotations problems because what I would like is when I 1) attach a note on the ereader side, 2) select the text to attach, 3) type the note on the tablet side, and I would like to be able to see that note on other platforms. Actually, in an ideal world, I would like to be able to attach a note from Evernote to specific text (like how one can attach a webpage), but I am not sure how feasible this is. I really know nothing with regards to the development side of this, but I feel like the issue with attached notes should not really that difficult since attaching a note on the Edge is like making a comment in Adobe. Perhaps it is just more complicated than that. Also, I have not actually tried the OneNote conversion software yet. I have it downloaded, and I can definitely see some benefits from that, especially since I just discovered a math input editor on Windows 7 that converts handwritten math into typed equations. So I plan to play around with this more in the near future. I'll report back here with anything I find.

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