Touch Unable to read PDF books

Originally Posted by Marbles

The Vox on the other hand you have to go back to the original size to turn each page.

Adobe Reader keeps the page size when going from page to page and automatically zooms to the page width in landscape mode (which usually leaves the text large enough to read). It also seems to be considerably faster while rendering complex PDFs.

[BensonBear]

Originally Posted by jusmee

it opens, but I cannot read it because the text is way too small, and if I zoom in, then the page turning no longer works (unless you laboriously slide it off the side and touch on the arrow that appears)
How are we meant to read PDFs when the software behaves like this?

You are correct. So correct. But it is easy to fix...

Originally Posted by jusmee

It's really not a question of satisfaction. You simply cannot read the PDF I tried. Zoomed out, it is far to small to be human readable. Zoomed in, you can read it - only bits at a time as you pan around, and you can't turn to the next page without multiple swipes or touches. I am starting to wish it wasn't a touchscreen device, and they'd provided a button to turn the page.

In landscape mode, zoomed to the max to use up your margins (usually around 240%), is it big enough? I think probably it is, for you and for many, and then you can read it without panning left to right. So all you need is a way to move down in the page, and to the next page. They should make this a page tap in some location of the screen (for both cases, so it is JUST LIKE the epub reading). Don't even need a button. They can fix it!

Originally Posted by Marbles

I find reading PDF's easier on the Touch even though you have to screw around with the page turns. It at least keeps it the size that I have chosen.

Yes, you have to screw around. We agree, this is bad bad bad. Also, it keeps the size, BUT if you accidentally tap twice too fast, it "zooms" to 200% (which for me, usually means SHRINKING from a higher zoom), or to 100%, which of course is even worse. Then a pain to fix it.

Originally Posted by BWinMill

Alas, there isn't much that we can do about it at the moment. This is due to a limitation of PDF files colliding with a limitation of eInk displays.

I think that rather it is because PDF's are defined to really take, in most cases, 8 inches horizontally. You can't shrink them in portrait mode to fit a page on the screen (for a normal book) and make them readable You can try to reflow, but they are not designed to do that, and in general, it is very hard to do it nicely. But shrinking to fit about 1/2 page or so in landscape mode (a zoom of typically about 240% given typical margins) makes them quite readable, leaving only the problem of advancing in the document.

Originally Posted by BWinMill

You have a couple of options here. You can try making a constructive suggestion to Kobo to improve page turning when zoomed in (easy to implement, thus realistic) or to add an option to reflow text in PDF files (more difficult, thus less realistic).

Yes, "REALISTIC". Very. Contrary to your earlier quoted pessimism, it is easy to fix. PAGE TURNING must be improved, and it is EASY. More precisely, MOVING DOWN IN THE DOCUMENT must be improved. Not just page turning -- one command to MOVE DOWN (which may or may not require a page turn in each particular case).

Reflowing is way too hard. Impossible in general really. Unreasonable to ask for it. We do not want to be unreasonable! But this is a VERY reasonable request, easy to do, and important. I mean, making moving through (the most common and typical) pdf files the same easy task as moving through epub files? No brainer!

The option of tap-to-move-down in document can easily be generalized nicely to multi column operation, at least for the typical 8x11 pdf (journal articles, magazines, books with multi columns). Just set the number of columns (say it is N) and tap-to-move-down will actually move up to top of page from bottom of page the first N-1 times.

It is EASY, and, unlike many requested changes, it is IMPORTANT.

[Mattypants]

Since pdfs seem to be a bit of a fail on the KT, can they be reliably converted to epubs? (I'm guilty of not Googling this before asking, but wondering if any of you have had any success with it). Will report back if I have any myself.

[PeterT]

For some guidance, look in the calibre conversion forum, especially at this note

[BensonBear]

Originally Posted by Mattypants

Since pdfs seem to be a bit of a fail on the KT, can they be reliably converted to epubs? (I'm guilty of not Googling this before asking, but wondering if any of you have had any success with it). Will report back if I have any myself.

It is far more reasonable to attempt to convert pdfs on one's own rather than expect Kobo to do it. There is no clear specification of what "reflowing" a pdf even means and different people will be differently satisfied by different ways of doing this. What Kobo SHOULD do is read pdfs in their native format by zooming automatically in portrait mode to the maximum possible (subject to user modification when it guesses wrong) and have nice commands to advance in the book that do not require panning. This will probably satisfy a lot more people a lot more easily.

I have not found any program that does a nice pdf convert to "reflow" it. Calibre suggests you use search and replace to match the headers and footers to remove them, but this seems very difficult. Then it will not figure out either how to join the text on the two successive pages.

Rather than local regular expressions to match headers and footers, I think one needs a heuristic like "the font has changed near the end of the page, and remains mostly changed until the end of the page, perhaps after a space which is larger than usual". Calibre or some other program could add a set of hueristics like this that the user could apply before converting. In the source for pdftohtml, they can be applied at the point where it has gathered up all of the text for the page into a set of line segments.

If I keep my Kobo I will probably try to add these to pdftohtml. Including one to detect typical footnotes and divert them to another section of the epub, and add a link to that section. Then you can go back and forth between text and footnotes, and this can probably be done without the extremely difficult task of finding out how footnotes are represented in the particular text. All one needs to do is detect where the footnote text starts at the bottom of the page and this can probably be done in many texts without too much difficulty.
But I think the heuristics need to be page-global, based on physical spacing and text size, not local regular expressions.