Sony PRS-600 PDF ZOOM

[NightWhistler]

I think the reflow is great, and like earlier posters said: they got the soom almost right...

I often read the PDF version of tech books, and they tend to have margins of whitespace around the text.

Within a single page, I can zoom just the way I'd want to so the text fills the screen and I'm not wasting any screen space on empty margins. This usually also brings the text up to a pleasant size. It's a complete pain in the backside to have to do this for every single page I read though... if it would remember the zoom and pan, it would be perfect.

What do you think the chances are of Sony implementing this? And is there any way to suggest it to them?

[terekkincaid]

Originally Posted by NightWhistler

I think the reflow is great, and like earlier posters said: they got the soom almost right...

I often read the PDF version of tech books, and they tend to have margins of whitespace around the text.

I'm in the same boat. I hope Sony does implement a fix, but here's what I do in the meantime. If you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat (not just the reader), you can open your file and open the Document menu and choose Crop Document. There is an option to remove all of the white margins from all of your pages (you can also set the margin manually if you want to go further). Do a Save As... and put the modifed file to your Reader (don't save over the original).

As you say, I hope Sony can come up with a way to do this automatically, but this workflow only takes me about 15-20 seconds to do, so it's worth it to trim up the papers I'm reading.

[NightWhistler]

Thanks for the tip!

After reading your post, I did a quick search and found that Ubuntu comes with a small command-line tool called pdfcrop, also available at http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/pdfcrop/

It does a per-page crop of all the white-space, in the margins. I tried it on one of my PDF books (Open Source ESBs in Action), and though it did take a long time (15 minutes or so), the result was really good. It looks a bit weird in a normal PDF viewer (the title page was stripped to just the title text), but on the PRS-600 it looks great.

So, thanks for the inspiration... this will make reading papers and books so much more convenient.

By the way, I also found this tool: http://pdfcrop.sourceforge.net/

Haven't tested that one yet though.

[jbone1313]

I just found this. It works great. You have to fiddle with the settings to get the margins right. Once you get them right, the PDFs become very readable (without increasing fonts or zooming) in landscape mode. Try using negative values for the margin settings to decrease the margins.

Use option #5 "Reformat Multiple Pages".

http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html

[stigma]

Originally Posted by davidspitzer

if you turn the page it drops you out of zoom and goes to the next page where you will have to zoom into that page if it tickles your fancy to do so. Not perfect but better then not having the zoom feature at all like the 505 - I have faith it will be improved via an update soon

Did they fix that already?
I hate to workaound this problem with cropping tools. Some PDFs just have too much margin and too small fonts to read on a ebook reader.

[pking36330]

I don't know if someone has mentioned this before, but for non-DRM pdf files, you can send them to Adobe via email and get a text file returned automatically (within minutes).

Send the email to pdf2txt@adobe.com, make the subject pdf2txt and attach the pdf.

From there you could convert to other formats. I know this would normally be the long route and there are better/faster methods, this is just another option.

[YepYep]

I use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to open up pdf's with a lot of whitespace and select the crop tool (works only in non-secured pdf's). There is a button to apply this crop-selection you have made to all pages at the same time (but it is better to do even and uneven pages separately). I crop as close as possible to the text block. Forget about any headings or pagenumbers, just crop the text block because your e-reader will show the page number anyway.

If in portrait mode this still makes for undesirably small page size, then turn on landscape mode. This works great for me.

Also note that you will probably not want to convert your pdf into a textfile (either by e-mailing Adobe or by clicking on Medium/Large on your Sony e-reader). Changing your pdf into a textfile will mess up the lay-out, pictures and will forget about any special characters (and formula's etc.). This whole exercise is to keep the article/book you're reading in the original state but with as little white space as possible.

Note to students, check with your university if they offer a free a copy of Adobe Master Suite (or maybe not free but for a small fee), mine did.