PRS-T1 Help with landscape mode on T1

[pj123]

Hi, I use PRS-T1 and like to read my 2-column PDF in landscape mode. Is there any way to use the 2-column mode in landscape? Also, is it possible to annotate PDF in landscape? Thank you.

[bjrnfrdnnd]

Hi there,

In addition to the non-working two-column mode for pdf reading in landscape, the cropping mode in landscape does also not work (or only partially: tight cropping in order to make disappear all white margins is not possible; it seems that the minimum surface allowed by cropping in landscape mode is somehow the same as in portrait mode - always leaving you with a lot of white space on the right and left).

Automatic cropping also leaves out a lot of margins on the right and left, as does the fitting to landscape width option.

Overall, reading A4 pdfs with small fonts is nearly impossible.

Did anyone find a solution to any of this? Does Sony know about the bugs in cropping and two-column viewing in landscape mode?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bjrnfrdnnd

Hi there,

In addition to the non-working two-column mode for pdf reading in landscape, the cropping mode in landscape does also not work (or only partially: tight cropping in order to make disappear all white margins is not possible; it seems that the minimum surface allowed by cropping in landscape mode is somehow the same as in portrait mode - always leaving you with a lot of white space on the right and left).

Automatic cropping also leaves out a lot of margins on the right and left, as does the fitting to landscape width option.

Overall, reading A4 pdfs with small fonts is nearly impossible.

Did anyone find a solution to any of this? Does Sony know about the bugs in cropping and two-column viewing in landscape mode?

Cropping crops all around the page. So if the page hits the top and bottom and has margins left over on the left and right, that's the way it is.

[bjrnfrdnnd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Cropping crops all around the page. So if the page hits the top and bottom and has margins left over on the left and right, that's the way it is.

I do not quite understand this reply. Cropping means chopping away parts of the page. In portrait view, this cropping works on all 4 edges of the page. In landscape view, I cannot even position the cropping rectangle in such a way as to cut parts of both the right and left hand side of the page, because the device does not allow the cropping rectangle to shrink to the desired amount.
For example, on my ipad, cropping works flawlessly in goodreader on the same document in landscape and portrait mode: I can take away an arbitrary amount of space on any of the 4 edges.
For the PRS - T1, this works partly in portrait and even less in landscape mode.

[vishcompany]

Did you try reflow? You can do so by choosing a larger fontsize. If the pdf is not pure graphics, but has actual text embedded, it will work.
I very reluctantly loaded a pdf-book on my T1 yesterday. (I try to avoid this format. It's just the worst format for ebooks. All readers on the market have issues with pdf). I was amazed at how well it worked. With a purely text based pdf-book, I don't notice a difference to epub. The text just reflows. Page turns are slower, though.

[gentleice]

The two-column mode works in landscape for me. Well, sort of. Some bits of text got chopped off at the bottom of the screen. It's not a big deal though. The top two-thirds of the last line is visible and that's enough to figure out the rest. The equations in the pdf turned out a little funny, but that happened even in "normal" mode. I set the orientation to landscape first before selecting the two-column mode, but it seems to work the other way round as well.

As for cropping, it seems the T1 insists on preserving aspect ratios, so there's no way to crop just the left or right margins without affecting the top and/or bottom margins. It's frustrating, especially in landscape mode, but not a deal-breaker for me. Actually, I'm quite pleased with the T1's handling of pdfs. The reflow works great, as vishcompany pointed out. And in a relatively short document of around 30 pages, there was no observed degradation in page-turn speeds. Things slowed down a bit with larger pdfs, but not so much that it's annoying.

[bjrnfrdnnd]

I tried reflow, it was a mess. The usual physics article or textbook is near unreadable on this device.
I used the pocketbook 360 before that. The prs t-1 is in many respects better than the pocketbook, but pdf readability is better. Multiple columns display works in landscape and portrait.
It is much slower though and has no touchscreen.
I just hoped the T-1 would be at least as well as the pocketbook. Sadly, I was deceived.


But to come back to the problem: I think that the problem described by me is a bug. I do not see any reason why 2-column display works in portrait but not in landscape mode, and why cropping should be restricted to some region.
To insist on the cropping problem: of course the T-1 conserves aspect ratio. This is completely normal and should be that way. I am not complaining about that. I am complaining that the region to which I can shrink using cropping is too large: both automatic and manual cropping leave not only the white margins on both sides of the page, but in addition some more space. Cropping should just be completely manually adjustable (conserving aspect ratio). If the cropping would work as desired, one could have in landscape mode the letters of one A4 page cover the entire screen space from left to right, in which case approximately three screen heights would be could to display the entire text.


There is the possibiity that I am not using the correct switches though. I am happy to provide the pdfs if anyone wants to give them a shot.

You can find them here:
files.me.com/bjrnfrdnnd2/6ny9eu
files.me.com/bjrnfrdnnd2/uii1n8

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by bjrnfrdnnd

If the cropping would work as desired, one could have in landscape mode the letters of one A4 page cover the entire screen space from left to right, in which case approximately three screen heights would be could to display the entire text.

I think this is the crux of the problem. You don't get the full width of the screen in PDF landscape because landscape can currently only split each page into 2 not 3+. This has also been true for all previous Sony models. I don't know whether other readers fared any better.

Have you done any experiments using various free PC utilities (e.g. Briss) to crop your PDFs before loading on the T1. It's fairly quick and may possibly give you a better result.