File Incompatibility Images Request

[Colt]

As I've been cruising around all of the older threads, I constantly run into comments about how "Yeah, the Reader supports PDFs but they're impossible to read." or "RTF/TXT files get chocked full of horrible line breaks and a million pages." But what do these problems actually look like? Some people seem to think they're not an issue while others think they're a joke. So... If anyone's willing, it would be nice to have some pictures of the Sony being a naughty little reader. You know, just for educational purposes.

Thanks. - Colt


P.S. - Why is the Reader gallery totally empty?

[Andanzas]

You may want to take a look at these links:

http://hightech.afmag.net/pdf-and-the-sony-reader.html

http://hightech.afmag.net/the-sony-r...fs-part-2.html

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by Colt

P.S. - Why is the Reader gallery totally empty?

Good point. We've never really promoted our gallery feature. It's something planned for the future though

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Colt

As I've been cruising around all of the older threads, I constantly run into comments about how "Yeah, the Reader supports PDFs but they're impossible to read." or "RTF/TXT files get chocked full of horrible line breaks and a million pages." But what do these problems actually look like? Some people seem to think they're not an issue while others think they're a joke. So... If anyone's willing, it would be nice to have some pictures of the Sony being a naughty little reader. You know, just for educational purposes.

Thanks. - Colt


P.S. - Why is the Reader gallery totally empty?

When you have RTF and TXT files with poor line breaks, usually that is referring to files that have hard returns in the middle of paragraphs.

As for PDF. The Sony has a 6" screen. PDF is means for 8.5"x11" printing in most cases. Now that with (in a lot of cases) silly wide margins (that you MS Word for poor default margins that a lot of people have no clue on how to change) and you get a fairly unreadable PDF when it is reduced down.

[Colt]

Hmm... Thanks for the links to the images of the PDF formatting. It seems like converting really does help quite a bit in clarity. I think it would be obvious that any PDF with a colored and textured background going onto a smaller screen with four shades of greyscale would be a pretty bad idea: Read it on the computer.

What's a TXT file look like? Those don't look very good even on the computer a lot of the time with long lengths of text. Thanks guys. - Colt

[HarryT]

Colt,

If you download and install the "Connect" software you'll be able to see for yourself how the Reader will handle any document. Its full-screen preview mode is an exact emulation of the "real" Reader in terms of what it displays.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Colt

Hmm... Thanks for the links to the images of the PDF formatting. It seems like converting really does help quite a bit in clarity. I think it would be obvious that any PDF with a colored and textured background going onto a smaller screen with four shades of greyscale would be a pretty bad idea: Read it on the computer.

What's a TXT file look like? Those don't look very good even on the computer a lot of the time with long lengths of text. Thanks guys. - Colt

Take your text file into Word, clean it up. Then save as RTF. Load the RFT into Book Designer, sort out the ToC, and whatnot. Write out the LRF file and you have a very well formatted text file.

[RWood]

On the conversion page of the MobileRead Wiki there is a listing for Stingo's Word Macro. It fixes the line ends for text files and makes them very presentable for loading on the Reader as RTF. I use it a lot for preprocessing files before I load them into BookDesigner.