Out of all bad technical PDF reading solutions, Aura One probably the best

[bazzz]

I received my Kobo Aura One yesterday. I read technical (software development) PDFs nearly exclusively. And I wasn't expecting much after reading the initial reviews.

But it wasn't that bad after all, if you're willing to put some work into it (which should - of course - not be necessary, KOBO IMPROVE YOUR PDF ENGINE ASAP!).

What I do:

- I cut the margins of the PDF via BRISS (http://briss.sourceforge.net/), make the margins really slim
- I save that cropped PDF to my Kobo Aura One
- Then zoom just slightly (105%), the footer disappears, page turns keep the orientation

Page turns have been with the PDFs I've tested slow, but not unusable slow.

fyi

[pickyaxe]

Nice writeup. In your opinion, is the text sufficiently large when reading whole-page PDFs in portrait? For a person with decent eyesight.

[bazzz]

Yes, it is. It would be nicer if it had a bigger display (say: 9"), but it's generally ok. It is like reading on a retina iPad mini, but with a much nicer display and a much worse PDF engine/CPU.

[johnnyb]

I agree, I found the display really pleasant in that regard and the size sufficient. If the PDF files do not have too large margins, the “adjust size to width” option is useful and carries over to the next page.
If there were highlighting and note options (and generally, better support for cropping on the device) , I might have kept mine for I would have gotten some unique use out of it...

[feebsjee]

What made you chose the Aura One over the Boox N96?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by bazzz

But it wasn't that bad after all, if you're willing to put some work into it (which should - of course - not be necessary, KOBO IMPROVE YOUR PDF ENGINE ASAP!).

You should address your complaint about PDFs to Adobe/Data Logic/etc. PDFs are rendered by the Adobe RMSDK software. It would be nice if Kobo enabled reflow for PDFs but since the whole idea of PDFs was to show pages as designed, reflow is contrary to that ideal.

I will admit the only PDF files I keep around are tech manuals, the few fiction books I had purchased were converted and then edited with Sigil to make them readable. I've opened some PDFs in Acrobat and resized which has given some rather odd results, most other's I open on my iPad since it's CPU power/memory/screen size make it a better PDF reader though even there the flipping A1 size diagrams are pretty much unusable with much scrolling.

[anacreon]

I have found reading many PDFs surprisingly comfortable on Aura One.

I use Acrobat to crop pages, not too thin margins for it to work on both left and right pages (most books have thinner margins on the spine side), and just enough zoom to suppress kobo page number on the bottom. I just miss the patch to eliminate the arrows.

Occasionally I've had to go into landscape mode, but I wouldn't like to have to do it with a long book.

Of course it is annoying to have to call the dictionary and enter the word I'm looking for, and it is only viable for GOOD scans of books that are not too dense or with annoyingly thin fonts, but I am pleased to be able to read books unavailable otherwise.