Classic Can someone review nook's PDF support?

[curio]

Originally Posted by binkman71

Keep in mind the nook also has no ability to switch screen orientation. So putting PDFs into landscape mode is not an option.

What's worse, it seems that explcitily landscape-formatted content (with text rotated by 90° in either direction), such as the default output of soPDF, is always reflowed, regardless of the font size setting, and the actual rotated text gets lost in the process (blank pages). So you can't make PDFs half-page-landscape even through reformatting.

Originally Posted by binkman71

The dedication page text is not centered on the nook, but is on my PC.

IMO this is because when reflowing, all text becomes left-aligned. Setting the font size to small retains the original layout but is usually too small even with, say, A5 paper in order to be read comfortable.

[Doug Pardee]

No change. PDF support is limited.

Viewing at "small" font size gives you the full page shrunken down to fit the screen. Viewing at a larger font size causes all of the various text pieces to be yanked from the PDF, scaled up, and displayed in a best-guess as to the correct sequence. Line breaks, paragraph breaks, and page breaks mangle the presentation, and header and footer lines will be interspersed.

Bookmarks, highlights, notes, dictionary, and text font style are non-functional in PDF.

Small-screen e-readers are simply a poor fit for PDF. PDF is a page-layout format, and unless the page was laid out to fit the small screen (like BeBook does), the result will necessarily be different from what the page creator intended.

[NileSpice]

I just bought a Nook yesterday and so far am very frustrated with the PDFs and the Nook in general. I bought mine mostly to read PDFs and am seriously considering returning it. Some PDFS don't open at all - don't know why. If the pages in the pdf were scanned - the 8 x 11 page is displayed in whole - which makes it impossible to read since there is no zoom so the print is ver tiny. The format of non-scanned PDFS is OK - but varies from PDF to PDF.

The file names in the Nook library are not taken from the filename. (Why?) They are taken from the title within the PDF properties. So about half the time I have no idea what PDF it is and being a PDF - I can't change the properties title. When it has no title - then the Nook file name is seemingly random and very weird.

The Nook guide says it reads both protected and unprotected PDFS - but it can't read either of the 2 protected PDFS I loaded. One won't open at all and the other shows 120 blank pages!

About the only good thing I can say is that there is a Go To feature that lets you choose a page or slide a bar to choose a page and that works pretty well.

[kuhanalog]

Here is my experience with reading mathematical papers on the Nook:
http://arminstraub.com/mathematics/r...rs-on-the-nook

In particular, (if possible) you may want to use latex to reflow the pdf. Also, if you want to "properly" view a landscape pdf, you need to rotate the pages first.

Hope that's helpful to someone...

[dharh]

Originally Posted by NileSpice

The file names in the Nook library are not taken from the filename. (Why?)

Because metadata provides much better information. There is a program call Calibre that you should look into, even if you do return the nook for something else. Calibre will allow you to convert, move files to and from your e-reader, and change the metadata. It will even organize your files for you on your computer.