Zooming on the DX

[osama_jamal]

I am a PRS 505 owner and am considering the DX as my large screen reader for PDFs mainly and textbooks. I need to make sure however that it can zoom in into documents, in landscape and flips pages while maintaining the zoom level.

Can anyone help me with this?
Pictures will be greatly appreciated.
Can KDX annotate PDF files?

[osama_jamal]

I think it also can. I was looking for help on the zoom function. If it can zoom then now it is a much better suited device for education. Maybe the best choice since the eDGe is very bulky.
I was waiting for a Que but they are not rationale with their delays. The device is now two years in development! Very long and disappointing!

[Latinandgreek]

I'm pretty sure that you can only annotate with the hard keyboard and that it doesn't support hand-annotations (no stylus). Here is a link to the MR wiki:

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_DX

It seems that it can do landscape rotation, I'm not sure about the zoom, reflow, etc.

[FrozenRiver]

You can zoom into a pdf page, sure. But only 150%, 200% and 300% options are available, no free zoom. You can rotate the screen 360 degrees.

So far you cannot annotate in a pdf file. Nor is dictionary available.

[dariop]

You can bookmark pages within PDF in DX, and the PDF's pages are well numbered it goes to the right page of the book. Anyways, if you are reading text books it is better and faster annotate in a blank page!

[mdovell]

I have a strong feeling the next kindle is a touch one...software updates in the future could probably have a greater zooming function..

Basically if the products of eink look to be the same it's going to eventually push companies to do more (other than lower the price)

[osama_jamal]

I don't understand why are we getting into a discussion on K3. I was just looking for a reason not to get an Entourage Edge and get a DX instead. =(

Can't just someone give me some photos regarding reading PDF textbooks on DX and how the zoom works?
Pleeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaasseeeee
Thanks

[paperwastage]

well, my friend has a refurb US Kindle DX coming monday or so next week, and I can do the same thing I did here for the dx

[tomsem]

there's no support for PDF links, either (e.g. to jump from a TOC or index to the referenced location). You can set bookmarks to help out with navigation a little, but ick.

[eboyhan]

zooming on the kindle is not like zooming in adobe reader -- it's like putting a magnifying glass (of fixed zoom % as mentioned above) over the page. It's enlarged, but some of the page will now extend beyond the right margin, and you will have to pan to see the stuff off the right edge. Contrast this with zoom in the adobe reader. There the font size is zoomed, and then the whole document is reflowed/re-laid-out to accomodate the zoomed font size -- so everything stays within the left/right margins (no panning necessary). Reading on a kindle with pan and zoom is improved, but is in nowise a pleasant useful experience for long reads. If a document is created as a PDF with the KDX in mind as the target, then a quite pleasing experience is possible. But if the font size at creation is too small for the kindle, then zoom will help, but it will not be a pleasant reading experience.

Hope this helps.

[Sheikspeare]

The comparison with Adobe reader isn't entirely accurate. Keep in mind that PDFs on a PC are almost always viewed in a 'landscape' shaped screen. With an eReader you're viewing it in a 'portrait' shaped screen, which is why you don't have excess on the sides for zooming.

I can't see the point of zoom on the DX - except only when the text is formatted in two or more columns.

[eboyhan]

When I read pdf's with the adobe reader I almost always do it in portrait mode with black bars on the left and right sides. I can change (with adobe reader) how pc screen real estate is used, or I can zoom the fonts and reflow as described above.

On the kindle its reader attempts to use all screen real estate all the time. Unless the pdf was created with the KDX in mind, you don't get very readable results.

You are right that the zoom as implemented by Amazon isn't all that useful (except perhaps for blowing up complex diagrams, figures, or pictures). Read on the DX in landscape mode is a little better save that there isn't very much text on each page, and paging forwards and backwards pdf's while in landscape mode is very much slower than the same operation in portrait mode.

Your thought about two column texts are not particularly valid (in my experience with same on the DX) as the zoom percentages (150, 200, 300%) seem more suited to the non-DX kindles. At any rate with two column texts, and zoom, you need to pan a lot to the other column -- also with the fixed zoom percentages, and the non-continuous pan movements possible, it is often not possible to set a kindle dx up in a way to make reading two-column texts practical/pleasing (ie able to read without a lot of back and forth panning)

My experiences have been with a lot of pdf's from a variety of store-bought and self-created sources on a KDX US. I have zero experience with regular kindles -- perhaps zoom and pan is more usable on those smaller devices.

I only hope that Amazon soon comes out with a more useful PDF reading capability either on existing, or new devices.

As currently implemented the kindles do not handle pdf's well enough to deal with long reading sessions of the textbooks/technical books where pdf's make the most sense.

Amazon needs a pdf reader at least as good as Adobe's -- the current kindle processors, however, may not be fast enough to support such a reader.