Book People Archive

Re: (BP) Working through the maze of PDA formats for etexts...

Kellscraft Studio wrote:

> ugly, (little difference from .txt).  I've played with the Adobe reader for
> PDAs and it's not bad, but I'm not having much luck getting it to format
> properly when it converts standard PDF docs to PDA pdfs. Either I'm not
> using it right or it's got some bugs.

   I haven't worked with it in a while now, but I came to the conclusion that
in order for a PDF document to work well it has do be designed for the screen
size of the PDA (in my case it's a Pocket PC). Anything else requires reflow,
and then so many thing change so that you might as well use plain HTML:
the result tends to be legible only with great effort. OK for some things,
but reading with any degree of pleasure seems impossible.

   In other words, the document needs to be recreated with a suitable page
size, tailored to the screen size (I think -- I've only tried one size so
far), as well as given a suitable margin size. Typeface has to be chose to
fit the fairly limited screen resolution -- either use faces designed for
screen use (Georgia, Verdana etc.), or the smallest optical sizes of
suitable Adobe OT typefaces: Utopia Std Caption sizes or Minon Pro Caption
sizes seem to do well.  Even then, small pages/narrow columns means a lot
of work to get an even text flow on the page.

   PDF can be used, but it takes lot of work. And as I said, I only
experimented with Pocket PC -- Palm may be a different beast.

   I don't think PDA's are there yet. eBook devices may be closer.

-- 
Anders Thulin     ath*algonet.se     http://www.algonet.se/~ath