Questions for new Iliad owners!

[DrBibber]

Hope they will release an A4 version of the Iliad for reading larger documents :-) Thats more comfortable then scrolling or zooming with these display refresh rates :-) Size does matter :-D

[Sight Seer]

Originally Posted by oliverbogler

The quick answer is that at the moment PDFs that can be cropped aggressively are just readable. Ones that cannot, border on the unreadable, IMO and with my eyes (just turned 40 and everything is getting blurrier...).

Croppability depends on the source of the pdf - most journals allow it, but for example, Nature ones do not. If you have a specific example in mind, please send it to me or post it, and I can try it and upload a photo.

Reflow would be better, and would work great for some journals. I tried this with a random sample of the pdfs I have of scientific papers, and it only worked with a very few - those that provide a pdf of the typesetting information, I guess. Many however have pdfs that are images of a page. (The ones I reflowed, were exportable to html and thence to a word processor and could be made into a more readable document, but that took as long as it might to read half the paper - so not a good time investment.) If the iLiad PDF viewer gains reflow capability, that would be great - but only in a few cases. Zoom is likely to be more useful - a key would be to have good navigation around the zoomed document.

For me the cropping works best, and I can now read papers on a plane, or anywhere, and can carry hundreds with me, and not have to print and waste time, paper and ink. The 16 grays do make a difference, as does the size, when compared to Sony.

As suggested, I took a few of the pdfs that I have and cropped the white margins and resized to A5 using Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Was easy to do. The question - is the 100% view size of this modified pdf the size that is shown on the screen of the Iliad? If so - it is a bit small but readable. I was also wondering if you can choose whether the Iliad scrolles through the document or if it can deliver it page by page?

[vranghel]

My question is for the iliad owners living in Canada: how long did the shipping take?

I ordered my iliad yesterday (1st of August) and i'm really looking forward to getting it.

[KILI]

Originally Posted by Sight Seer

As suggested, I took a few of the pdfs that I have and cropped the white margins and resized to A5 using Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Was easy to do. The question - is the 100% view size of this modified pdf the size that is shown on the screen of the Iliad? If so - it is a bit small but readable. I was also wondering if you can choose whether the Iliad scrolles through the document or if it can deliver it page by page?

K, post a copy if this is possible (copyright...) or send me via e-mail a sample. I will load it and make a picture of it for U.

[Sight Seer]

Originally Posted by KILI

K, post a copy if this is possible (copyright...) or send me via e-mail a sample. I will load it and make a picture of it for U.

Kili - here is a pdf file that I cropped and saved in A5 format. I can read it at 100% on my computer, but it is a bit small. I will be interested to see what the pages look like on the Iliad. Also, if you can get a shot of a page with one fo the figures, that would be nice. Thanks!

[haraldb]

Originally Posted by Sight Seer

Kili - here is a pdf file that I cropped and saved in A5 format. I can read it at 100% on my computer, but it is a bit small. I will be interested to see what the pages look like on the Iliad. Also, if you can get a shot of a page with one fo the figures, that would be nice. Thanks!

I just had some spare time and so I decided I might as well take the pictures you wantend, sight seer. I hope you don't mind, kili...

My personal judgement, as pictures are sometimes a little delusive: You CAN read the text, but only if you have good eyes. It's not what I would call a relaxed read. However it's readable and again I'm impressed of the "crispness" of the iLiad's display (the pictures don't really do it justice)...

[KILI]

Originally Posted by haraldb

.... I hope you don't mind, kili... ....

NP bro. Seer, looks like our problems are simular. Look at the pics below.

1. Is ok so far so good
2. Is also good
3. Here is where the fun begins. This comes from the same doc. In original doc it is in landscape. Some is readable, some guessable, most nothing of the sort.
4. Well....when I zoom in with my dig cam then I can make out some words but....

Ok, as I understand it A5 is the ideal format. My doc is A4. I bet that viewing my A4 in a A5 window (A5 is half A4 right?) but then in landscape would maybe give me a result I want. Zoom of course would be fine but won't this give me also a reasonable result. Maybe for the short term this would be feasable?

[Sight Seer]

Originally Posted by haraldb

I just had some spare time and so I decided I might as well take the pictures you wantend, sight seer. I hope you don't mind, kili...

My personal judgement, as pictures are sometimes a little delusive: You CAN read the text, but only if you have good eyes. It's not what I would call a relaxed read. However it's readable and again I'm impressed of the "crispness" of the iLiad's display (the pictures don't really do it justice)...

Thanks haraldb! The pages look surprisingly good -- the crop and A5 format seem to work well. The small text size could be problematic over the long haul but maybe not - is it like reading point 8 font? Can't really tell the font size from the pictures without a size reference. I am sorely tempted to purchase a reader but I will probably wait a bit until the software is a bit further along the development road...not sure when that will be since it seems it is likely to be a very long and likely unending road.

[Sight Seer]

Originally Posted by KILI

NP bro. Seer, looks like our problems are simular. Look at the pics below.

1. Is ok so far so good
2. Is also good
3. Here is where the fun begins. This comes from the same doc. In original doc it is in landscape. Some is readable, some guessable, most nothing of the sort.
4. Well....when I zoom in with my dig cam then I can make out some words but....

Ok, as I understand it A5 is the ideal format. My doc is A4. I bet that viewing my A4 in a A5 window (A5 is half A4 right?) but then in landscape would maybe give me a result I want. Zoom of course would be fine but won't this give me also a reasonable result. Maybe for the short term this would be feasable?

Kili - The text in flow charts can be pretty small even in full size print versions. I have a feeling that zoom will be important when viewing these types of "figures". Does the Iliad allow the user to rotate the orientation of the page view of a pdf once loaded? This might help, but in the adobe readers (e.g. 7.0), page rotation is not accompanied by any change in magnification.

I note in the pictures of my A5 pdf file that I cropped that the Iliad still put a white border around the page. I am hoping that when the Iliad's pdf reader program is "finalized" and allows zoom, that it would be possible to zoom just enough to remove the white margin and obtain larger text without having to loose the sense of the page layout.

[Paethon]

The pdf-viewer currently doesn't support pagerotation. But as I understood it they want to deliver a completly new pdf-viewer in the near future which will support pagerotation, zooming and even prerendering of the pages so the pageflips should become much faster.

[mross]

There were no books on mine when it arrived but it was easy to find and download some.

[NatCh]

Has anyone tried to use one of those scanner pen thingies on the iLiad screen?

I'm just wondering if it works or not.

[k2r]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

Which is effectively what I said. The document is "locked up", preventing user modification.

Which brings me back to my original question: how does one modify a document that is intended to be non-modifyable by anyone except the author?

This is a common misunderstanding.
PDF are editable unless not explicitly saved in an encrypted state.
The idea of PDF was to providing a format that is a digital yet compact* representation of a document - independently* from the fonts and printer drivers that are installed on the viewers machine.

PDFs - unless not explicitly disabled by the author - are perfectly editable in it's specific bounds using the right software.

Eg: You can define a header and a footer in your favorite wordprocessor. If you send the wordprocessors file to me by email, the file might look differenty on mine than on your screen since my system might use different fonts or a different printer driver or a different version of the application.

This is especially true for Microsoft Word.

If you generate a PDF it will contain every* information that is necessary to view exactly* the same.
However, the information that some text is a header/footer has been translated to the information that a specific letter-shape is located exactly at a specific location on the virtual paper.

Since the definition of the PDF format is public* there are quite a lot of applications capable of editing (eg cropping, removing text ...) these files.

(* "in an ideal world

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by k2r

Since the definition of the PDF format is public there are quite a lot of applications capable of editing (eg cropping, removing text ...) these files.

And now for the $64,000 Question: What software?

So far, I've used pdftohtml, with low success. Other an Adobe products, I've seen nothing else that can edit a PDF.

[TadW]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

And now for the $64,000 Question: What software?

So far, I've used pdftohtml, with low success. Other an Adobe products, I've seen nothing else that can edit a PDF.

Probably the best tools, alas also the most pricy, for converting PDF to HTML are:

• BCL Magellan
• Iceni Gemini

And there are also tools for editing exiting PDF files without converting them first to another format:

• Enfocus PitStop
• Jaws PDF Editor