Pdfs and Small Screens

[MarjaE]

Many academic articles are published as two-column pdfs that are a pain and a half on small screens.

Most e-readers have small screens.

I have an Iriver Story Hd. I can't use touch devices and have trouble with glowing screens, so it's been hard trying to find a larger-screen device.

So are there good tools to batch-convert two-column pdfs to more readable formats? Without ocr errors everywhere?

I use Mac OS X on my computer, and Iriver's version of Linux.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by MarjaE

...
So are there good tools to batch-convert two-column pdfs to more readable formats? Without ocr errors everywhere?
...

Simple answer, no such tools exist and it's very unlikely that any will ever be developed.

[MarjaE]

... It figures. If it's useful, it will be phased out. Like touchscreen-free e-readers. If it would be useful, it won't be developed.

P.S. I know ocr can be unreliable, and frustrating on the Internet Archive and elsewhere, and I get that recognizing column breaks, etc. could be unreliable. I just figured that good tools could explain the rarity of large-screen e-readers.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by MarjaE

... It figures. If it's useful, it will be phased out. Like touchscreen-free e-readers. If it would be useful, it won't be developed.

It's not that at all. It is the nature of PDF.

PDFs do not necessarily contain any sentence, paragraph, or other layer information. The contain merely strings of characters and/or other graphic elements along with their position on the page. Two adjacent characters can be located in totally different locations in the digital file and have absolutely do internal relationship.

It takes an AI to assemble the different pieces in a logical order. At present, such AIs are limited to using the position information in order to reassemble the document flow. We'll never have truly good tools until an AI is developed that can comprehend sentence structure and use that in order to do the reassembly. The tools we have, a poor as they are, actually do a rather decent job given the Herculean task put before them.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall <=the book before converstion to PDF
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall <=the book being converted to PDF
All the King's Horses and all the Kings Men <=the available conversion tools
Couldn't put Humpty together again <= FOL with PDFs

[faltradl]

Don't look for an e-reader. Buy instead a tablet with big enough display. Of course after checking the pdf-viewer on it.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by dwig

Simple answer, no such tools exist and it's very unlikely that any will ever be developed.

How can you say that a described tool doesn't exist? Do you have a complete list of software ever written or something?

Reading journals on a small screen is relatively frequent request.
I personally use softwaer called pdf scissors. It is a small Java script app that works under Windows, Linux or MacOSX.
You cut the article to a series of small cuts - much more readable on a small screen. For example you can cut the left column into 3 pieces and the right one to 3 pieces as well, so pdf scissors will produce 6 "pages" for each processesed page of the multi-page journal.

Also consider using your e-ink reader in landscape. This way even text that is in only one column can become much more readable of you cut away the margins and divide the page into 2-3 landscaep cuts.

Recently I had problem running the pdf scissors software - my browser started to complain that I can't use Java that way ...
So I have downloaded briss. Tehre is even mac version of Briss.

[MarjaE]

Originally Posted by faltradl

Don't look for an e-reader. Buy instead a tablet with big enough display. Of course after checking the pdf-viewer on it.

I've looked. I even have one I bought on clearance and can't use or return. I haven't found one with buttons instead of a touchscreen. I have tried to use an Ipega controller to work around a touchscreen. I haven't found any way I can use any of the available tablets.

I've also used landscape mode on my e-reader. I still have to jump up and down, wait for the machine to respond, find my place, etc.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by kacir

How can you say that a described tool doesn't exist? Do you have a complete list of software ever written or something?
...

OK, there is an astronomically small chance that what the OP asked for exists, but in the well over a decade of following MR almost daily no one has ever posted any reference to any piece of software that will automatically do the job and therefore would have any possibility of fulfilling the OP's request for a batch processing tool.

There are tools that can help in making large format PDFs more functional on smaller screens, but all of these tools require some degree of document specific manual "guidance" and none of them work on all PDFs.

[rkomar]

I mentioned k2pdfopt in another thread. It exists solely to convert PDF layouts, so yes, such software does exist. That software even has it's own thread in the PDF forum on this site, so it's not that hard to find. I'm sure it would work fine for converting two column layouts to single column. If all of the papers are of that layout, then all is fine. I've seen many complicated layouts, though, including images and tables and equations that span both columns, and I don't personally know if k2pdfopt handles those situations well, but there's only one way to find out. Try the software; it's free to use.

Here's the link to the software's site: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

[MarjaE]

Thanks. It's Windows-only, though.

I currently use OS X. Previously used Linux on Windows machines. I had a hell of a time with a Toshiba which was painfully bright, even at the minimum setting, and painfully loud. I also had a hell of time with a Sony which had incompatible touchpad drivers, so I couldn't disable tapping in Linux, though it might have worked alright in Windows. I later tried an Asus hybrid, when I was still trying to use touch devices. I couldn't get the accessibility settings to work. So my experience with Windows isn't even hit-and-miss.

[eschwartz]

k2pdfopt is not Windows-only. What on earth gave you that idea?

[MarjaE]

I missed the download section and saw the "MS Windows integrated GUI front-end" section and a few other windows-specific sections.

[eschwartz]

So, have you tried it? Does it solve your problem?

[MarjaE]

I just downloaded it. I haven't figured out how to install it.

[eschwartz]

http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/help/mac.shtml