Would it be better if I convert pdf into epub?

[fantasyvn]

I have read many threads here which said PRS - like many other e-readers - are not perfect when you want to view PDFs, especially textbooks and scientific papers.

Does it make any difference if you first convert the PDF file into other formats like epub, using Calibre?

My sincere thanks.

[animedude01]

You can try, but not all PDFs convert well, especially if they're scanned images rather than straight text. You'll likely end up doing a lot of cleanup work to get them to the point you're happy with them. Of course, that does depend on how picky you are.

You can try looking through the forums as there are others who've done conversions, some of whom are happy, some not.

Give it a try, and see what you think.

[fantasyvn]

Thank you for your kind and prompt reply.

[Mike_73]

I'm reading a lot of pdfs and got so used to it, that I found it strange when I put an epub on my reader and could not zoom in so that I would lose the margins.
I tried converting to epub without margins with calibre without success, but got annoyed by yet another program that started up once I connected my reader to the pc (sorry, this thread is not about calibre).

Ok, anyways. In my opinion, the 600 resembles the best "pdf-reader" so far with the options of either zooming in (if you have documents with a lot of formatting like pictures, tables and such) or reflowing (for text mainly documents).

[fantasyvn]

Wow, very informative. Could you pls let me know how the PRS-505 deals with PDF files. Is it very fast and reliable?

[animedude01]

Well... I really like my Irex DR1000 for PDFs. The large screen means I don't have to zoom and everything displays properly.

Of course, it's much bigger than my PP, but I really only use it for PDFs now.

[Mike_73]

The 505 didn't deal too good with pdfs, but with it being the only "in-store-available" reader in Germany, it was acceptable for me. File-loading times were very slow. Sometimes I thought that my reader had stopped working (it didn't take any button input either during that time). As the 505 only has reflow, it worked ok with text only pdfs, but not so much with formatted pdfs including pictures. I mostly converted pdfs consisting of text and pictures, charts, etc. to pictures (extract every page as jpg). There you can choose the compression. The smaller the picture of a page, the faster the load times. If the pictures are numbered properly (extracting usually puts numbers in proper order automatically into the file name), you can just start with picture 1 and then with the next button, you get to the next page. One main backdraw is that you cannot pan around on the page. You can zoom in, but with the zoomed pages being split into several "display-pages", it can happen that a text column gets split right in the middle which makes reading (due to the page refresh times) from skipping left/right almost impossible.

So my final word on this is:
pdfs worked really ok as text files or if extracted as jpg-pages (be carefull about compression, too much and it won't be readable, too little and the pages will load slow).

[WillAdams]

The PRS-505 works well w/ .pdfs which are sized for the screen, or which one is able to read half at a time in landscape mode --- it does bog down a bit on .pdfs which are nothing but scans, but text and vector and reasonably sized bitmap images are fine.

William