Scientific 2-column pdfs with pictures on 902/903 - how do they look

[martinb]

Hi all,

I'm seriously interested in the PB903 - before buying it, I would like to know how a really complicated scientific pdf is displayed - none of the demos I have seen show what I need.
Could somebody with access to a PB902/903 do me a big favour and take a look at this free pdf paper which serves as a good example:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.o....full.pdf+html
and tell me if the diagram on page 3 and the drawing on page 4 are o.k.? And how about two-column papers in general? Are they readable directly or with reflow? Or in landscape mode?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Martin.

[SkyDream]

Try it tomorrow.

Pls note that 903 does not support PDF annotations. AdobeViewer for PDF currently does not work with the dictionary but has a good picture quality.

[rkomar]

There are various zoom modes that can be used for such a document (which is a mixture of one and two column formats). I use the AdobeViewer app rather than the pdfviewer app because I find the former does a better job of technical papers (i.e. with diagrams, equations, code snippets,...). In "Fit Width" and portrait mode, each entire page is readable, but the characters are rendered a bit thinly. Some of the words in Figure 1 are hard to read because they are coloured and translated to faint grey shades. The words are more readable if the reader is flipped over to landscape mode. I find the drawings to be clear in either portrait or landscape mode. In landscape mode, though, you can't see the top of the tall diagram on page 5 at the same time as the caption at the bottom of the figure.

For the pages laid out purely in two columns, the "two column" zoom mode works very well in portrait mode. It works in landscape mode, too, but the text gets pretty big. The panning is nice, in that it starts down the first column and jumps up directly to the top of the second using the same "Down" control button.

Reflow is useless for these types of documents, it seems to only be good for pure text documents. Figures are not shown, and captions, equations and code snippets are horribly botched. The other zoom modes work well enough on the large screen that I probably wouldn't use reflow anyway, even if it worked better.


I'm appending some screenshots I made with the note-taking feature. If anyone's interested, I found them under the system/config/Active Contents/mnt/ext2/ file hierarchy. The pictures only have 4 colours each, which seems strange, but might be due to the note-taking software.

[atango]

I use 902 for reading scientific papers in PDF format. I am satisfied with it, especially, the multi-column reading option works great.

I attached photos of different reading options for the file you linked.

[paola]

Originally Posted by martinb

Hi all,

I'm seriously interested in the PB903 - before buying it, I would like to know how a really complicated scientific pdf is displayed - none of the demos I have seen show what I need.
Could somebody with access to a PB902/903 do me a big favour and take a look at this free pdf paper which serves as a good example:
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.o....full.pdf+html
and tell me if the diagram on page 3 and the drawing on page 4 are o.k.? And how about two-column papers in general? Are they readable directly or with reflow? Or in landscape mode?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Martin.

absolutely impressive: if you reflow it, it follows the colums beautifully. With reflow, though, you lose the diagram, but then you can not reflow, keep the columns and zoom, and in landscapte to me is perfect - in portrait, reading the columns is tougher (though they are readable).
The fiel would not open with pdfviewer, only with Adobeviewer.

[review]

Yeah, reading scientific papers is certainly possible, however, there is literally no point in buying the more expensive touch screen pocketbook reader 903 as, like SkyDream has pointed out, annotations on the pdf are not possible. Further more it is not possible with the most recent firmware version to zoom in to a region marked with the pen. I had hoped for both of those options and still continue to hope for a revised firmware version. If I would have know it in advance I probably would have bought the 902 instead of the 903.

[martinb]

rkomar, atango
That's great, thanks a lot for your quick and kind help.

rkomar, your pictures almost look like taken from a printout.

I'm impressed.

Concerning the pdf notes, thanks for the hint. I think I'll go for the 903 anyway...

Thanks again

[SkyDream]

Originally Posted by martinb

rkomar, your pictures almost look like taken from a printout.

I'm impressed.

Pls note that pictures taken with the internal software may look different than taken with a camera.

[martinb]

@SkyDream
Ah, thanks, I did not realise that.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by SkyDream

Pls note that pictures taken with the internal software may look different than taken with a camera.

Definitely! I have an older digital camera whose resolution isn't very good, so I decided to not even try photographing the device. atango's pictures give a better idea of the scale and quality of the display, whereas the internal screenshots accurately show how the device renders the document in pixel detail before displaying it. The two sets of images are complementary.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by rkomar

Reflow is useless for these types of documents, it seems to only be good for pure text documents. Figures are not shown, and captions, equations and code snippets are horribly botched.

I wanted to add something to this comment. I use LaTeX to generate my own PDFs. Unfortunately, the software doesn't support making the documents reflowable. It's not that the developers aren't aware that this would be desirable; they know that many people are producing PDFs for mobile readers and that reflowing is an important feature. The problem is that they haven't been able to figure out how to properly handle things like equations, tables, figures,... which are essential to the mostly scientific crowd that uses LaTeX. If the problem is this hard for those writing the software for generating the PDFs, I can imagine that it would be similarly hard for those writing the software to display reflowed documents. So, I don't blame PocketBook/AdobeViewer/pdfviewer for not properly reflowing scientific documents, as I doubt that anybody else does a great job either.

[Dulin's Books]

The PDFviewer used in the PocketBook 902 CAN reflow the pics/diagrams with the text. Its one of the new features of the new line.

However I cant get the PDFviewer to open the file. I have sent it to PocketBook to see if then find why it the Adobe Viewer will open but PDF viewer wont.

[paola]

Originally Posted by Dulin's Books

The PDFviewer used in the PocketBook 902 CAN reflow the pics/diagrams with the text. Its one of the new features of the new line.

do you happen to know whether this is supposed to apply to the x03 series? Because it seems not to be working for me (PB903). Thanks!

[Dulin's Books]

yes the first time i saw it demonstrated was on the 903

[paola]

Originally Posted by Dulin's Books

yes the first time i saw it demonstrated was on the 903

well I will have to try again, though I was positive it did not work - thanks!