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Metus comments on Open thread for December 24-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I recently bought an e-reader. I found that PDFs of technical books or scientific papers are quite small. Does anyone around here use e-readers to read technical material? If so, is there an easy way to have a better reading experience on a kindle or do I just have to deal with it?
I often find myself reading PDF material on my Kindle, and I think I found some pretty decent workarounds. My three workarounds are:
If possible, try to find an epub or mobi version. For the more obscure, technical stuff, this is impossible, but for the more popular stuff, this is doable.
Try to use calibre to convert the PDF to a mobi. For some PDFs, this comes out with a good quality mobi, but often the PDF is formatted so that it does not.
But what often end up doing is a lot simpler: I turn the screen rotation sideways. Rather than the height of the Kindle being the height of the page, if it is the width of the page, you actually get a decent view. The width of the e-book reader becomes the height of the part of the page you can see, but thats what scrolling is for.
The third option works so well that I often don't bother with the first two, but all three are on the table for when I find a PDF I want to read.
Use K2pdfopt, briss, and/or soPdf.
Also, what ygert said. Converting from ePub to mobi is easy with Calibre, and converting from html to ePub is easy with Web2FB2. Even doc, docx, and, rtf stand a chance of being converted to ePub with LibreOffice and the correct plug-in (and that's if you can't just increase the font size on everything and export as PDF). Furthermore, some books have PDF versions optimized for smartphone or e-ink reading; it's pretty rare, but its a treat when it happens. More commonly, if you can find a Powerpoint presentation that covers the material you are interested in, that would be great; converting to PDF will leave it in a much more suitable aspect ratio.
If all else fails, consider buying a Kindle DX.
That's exactly why I bought a tablet with 8" 4:3 display. It's quite good for reading A4 sized PDF - a bit to the smallish side in portrait mode, but still very readable. And the rotate and zoom can more than compensate.
I won't bother you with naming the model - it was a cheap Chinese one, which I selected as a compromise of screen size (7" 16:9 is too narrow), weight (10" ones are heavy as hell) and battery life (10h of use).
If the OS is android, there's this neat app called Repligo reader that can intelligently reflow the text of pdf files so that you don't have to hassle with zooming.
Double-dipping to add: Calibre recommends not using PDFs as your source format if at all avoidable.
I feel like I should emphasize that it's not just that the format is ill-suited to conversion, but that Calibre's conversion routine for it is particularly poor; I quit using it when I noticed that the output was frequently truncated early.
Better conversion options:
All of those could potentially mess up equations and the like, though; so you might just have to deal with it or get a bigger device.
In addition to what others said, I find that turning the contrast to maximum helps somewhat.
I found that I need resolution first, screen size second. A vanilla Kindle with the 600x800 resolution won't work very well for PDFs, because the low resolution turns small elements into mush. But I find my 800x1280 resolution first generation Nexus 7 quite acceptable for most PDFs viewed in full-page mode.