Scientific papers on Kindle

[Junket]

Okay you've won me over to your way of thinking.

No PDF can be reasonably viewed on anything but 50 lb, 8.5 x 11 acid-free vellum cross hatch paper illuminated by indirect sunlight. Palm fronds optional but a bowl of grapes must be available.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Junket

Okay you've won me over to your way of thinking.

No PDF can be reasonably viewed on anything but 50 lb, 8.5 x 11 acid-free vellum cross hatch paper illuminated by indirect sunlight. Palm fronds optional but a bowl of grapes must be available.

But a scientific paper in PDF is not going to work well enough on any 6" eInk screen. I'm also thinking 7" may still be too small. Try an 8" screen with KOReader and see how it goes.

[Deskisamess]

I have several PDFs that I refer to occasionally, a user manual for a car stereo for example. I put that PDF on my Oasis 2nd gen, with a 7" screen.

It doesn't look bad, and while not a terrible experience, the screen refresh every time you enlarge or pan the page, would be tough to take on a regular basis. Navigation was surprisingly snappy, but not something I'd want to do to read an entire book.

I'm trying to upload a picture, but it's not working for me again. I get the Select Photo, hit upload, and the page goes blank. I have trouble off and on with uploading pictures here using my iPad. I've never been able to figure out why.

[jj2me]

Originally Posted by Junket

For PDF papers to be read on Kindle, there are two great options. One is a program called K2pdfopt which reformats PDFs to be enormously more readable on Kindle. A wonderful program. Have a look at some of the examples in this thread.

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Landscape orientation is worth a try.

I've had decent results with a 6" Paperwhite after running the PDF through k2pdfopt specifying native PDF output (not reformatting, merely reducing margins to fit more on a page) and landscape output. The page turns work intuitively in landscape, tap bottom for next, top for back.

I say "decent results" on a 6" reader because it's just on the cusp of comfortable readability for me. With a 7" Oasis, it should be considerably better.

==============================================

EDIT: Ignore useless text hidden in spoiler below. The latest k2pdfopt supports the Oasis 2.

Spoiler:

I just attempted to do a quick test on my new Oasis 2, but in k2pdfopt you select a device model in the rightmost dropdown, which "sets width, height, dpi, and corner marking for selected devices" according to the help for parameter "-dev". But there's no Oasis preset, so I don't know what settings to use.

Has anyone already figured this out? I don't have the need right now so don't want to spend the trial-and-error time.

Preliminary guesses (add these to command line/command line box on the GUI):

-w 1398 [wild guess because I don't know how this is determined: Oasis is native 1448px, PW2 is native 768px, but its -w value is 718px, so I likewise subtracted 50 from the Oasis's native 1448px.]
-h 1205 [similar wild guess, using the PW2's difference of 59px (1024 native - 965 value that k2pdfopt uses) to subtract from the native Oasis height of 1264 to get 1205.
-dpi 300 [a check of various devices shows this value is the native DPI]
[leave out corner marking spec because its default is "mark" and I have no idea how to set this--it's try till an error.]

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jj2me

I just attempted to do a quick test on my new Oasis 2, but in k2pdfopt you select a device model in the rightmost dropdown, which "sets width, height, dpi, and corner marking for selected devices" according to the help for parameter "-dev". But there's no Oasis preset, so I don't know what settings to use.

Has anyone already figured this out? I don't have the need right now so don't want to spend the trial-and-error time.

Preliminary guesses (add these to command line/command line box on the GUI):

-w 1398 [wild guess because I don't know how this is determined: Oasis is native 1448px, PW2 is native 768px, but its -w value is 718px, so I likewise subtracted 50 from the Oasis's native 1448px.]
-h 1205 [similar wild guess, using the PW2's difference of 59px (1024 native - 965 value that k2pdfopt uses) to subtract from the native Oasis height of 1264 to get 1205.
-dpi 300 [a check of various devices shows this value is the native DPI]
[leave out corner marking spec because its default is "mark" and I have no idea how to set this--it's try till an error.]

The current k2pdfopt maintainer responds to posts in the sticky k2pdfopt thread in the PDF forum
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=144711

I am sure that he would be happy to add Oasis entries. Be sure to let hime know the Oasis 1 is 6" and the Oasis 2 and 3 are 7" and all are 300 DPI.

[jj2me]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The current k2pdfopt maintainer responds to posts in the sticky k2pdfopt thread in the PDF forum
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=144711

I am sure that he would be happy to add Oasis entries. Be sure to let hime know the Oasis 1 is 6" and the Oasis 2 and 3 are 7" and all are 300 DPI.

Thank you, but dopey me was running an old version of k2pdfopt. I just updated and see the Oasis 2 is supported. Now to edit my above post.

[jj2me]

Just tried k2pdfopt on my Oasis 2 using this PDF as input.

Selected Kindle Oasis 2 in upper right drop-down menu.

Checkmarked in lower left of k2pdfopt:
- Output in landscape
- Native PDF output
There were then these other checkmarked items that I didn't change:
- Color output
- Smart line breaks
- Fast Preview

First try with the above settings lost pages 1 and 2, and lost some text on the right, so I changed the default values that the "Kindle Oasis 2" selection gave me:
- removed -cbox3- by editing Pages to convert
- changed width to 5.5 inches instead of 5 inches [do this under Crop areas]

These five Oasis 2 screens capture the first 2-1/2 pages of the PDF. Note that the pictures look very readable on most PC monitors because they display bigger in size than the actual Oasis 2. To get a more realistic idea of how readable it is, make the pictures smaller (e.g., "CTL -" several times in Windows browser) until they appear approximately the size of the actual Oasis 2. It's ok for my vision, just about the size I'd set if I could, though the super- and subscripts need decent ambient lighting, or more than my usual brightness setting of 8.

Also, scrolling is so natural in landscape, just scroll up to see more, down to see previous. Just love k2pdfopt. Couldn't find a donate button on the k2pdfopt page.

EDIT: Apologies, I just read more carefully and see that the technique (native PDF output) described in this post doesn't answer your stated problem: "the problem is that I can't highlight or use the dictionary or any other functions that allow you to interact with the text."

[JSWolf]

But how good is the PDF when in portrait? For a scientific PDF, you do not want the any of the graphics to be split and you don't want to have to fiddle to try to see the entire image. If portrait isn't good enough, then a 7" screen isn't good enough.

[Quoth]

I find most of my PDFs need 10". Some need larger to to be comfortable, like an external screen on laptop turned to Portrait. Years ago I did this with a 1600 x 1200 CRT, easier with an LCD monitor. Most OS can rotate the image on external screen, nearly for 20 years.

Certainly some work now on the 7" libra compared to 6" PW3. The 9.7" Kindle DXG was bought for PDFs and was useless because it was too slow and too low a resolution.

There are essentially two main kinds of PDF: Ones that are primarily a scan (though there might be an OCR layer for search) and ones that are exports from wordprocessing or other publishing source.
Since the idea of a page size and fix layout is inherent, and it's an envelope with instructions how to render identically on any printer the result of any PDF resizing, trimming or attempting to flow is variable from acceptable to disastrous. It's PURELY intended for transfer to paper and preview on a screen. It's not an ebook format.

Thus I didn't bother spending €100 extra for an 8" Forma over a 7" Libra when updating from the original 6.8" Aura H2O to get better resolution and page turn buttons. The Libra does do scanned PDFs very much faster (the H2O too slow to use on some suitable to read), however even with trimming, processing etc most of my PDFs still can't be used on it. You need a decent 10" or ideally 13" to 14" tablet to manage all PDFs, ESPECIALLY scientific papers, Magazines and larger format text books. Zoom and Pan is very painful on a multicolumn 100 page magazine.
You'd only look up a manual or datasheet with Pan & Zoom, not actually read loads of pages. Fortunately most of the thick operator manuals for small complicated gadgets with massively unituitive multilayer menus on small two line text displays are A5 size or less so work on the Aura H2O and now better on the Kobo Libra.
A decent Lenovo 10" tablet cost me less than €120 just after Christmas and I'd already bought a 256 G micro SDXC for my 10" Windows 10 Atom tablet, which is garbage in comparison and was slower to turn PDF pages than the Libra!