Comments on: Two Weeks with a Sony PRS-700: Reading PDFs

By: pond

pond — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:48:51 +0000

Thanks Chris, this whole series has been very informative. I wonder if the popularity of the Kindle and these other 6″ eInk devices might not nudge publishers into releasing PDFs in more than one page-size. For example, I would imagine that a PDF designed for a 6×9″ page would fit very nicely on the 700. Or say an A5 page size.

One thing I love about my 14″ Toshiba TabletPC is flipping it to slate mode and reading PDFs on it. You’re right, having a screen in portrait aspect ratio is key.

By: Liviu

Liviu — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:43:22 +0000

The tagged pdf’s are the ones that reflow well on the 700 And they do

I do not know the technical details, but some pdf’s have information inside (tagged) that tells appropriate software how to reflow and keep formatting, not break lines, paragraphs and so on…

It’s hit and miss even directly from publishers production from which I get pdf review arcs – some are tagged, some are not

The tagged ones, you just increase the size and they read perfectly, on par with epub’s in terms of loading/navigation time – epub’s look like tagged pdf’s to a large extent

Usually for untagged ones that reflow badly, cropping to the max to eliminate all margins is needed, and if worst comes to worst the horizontal half-page mode which I do not like that much.

For scanned pdf’s same as the above for untagged works as long as the scan is one page per image; otherwise you need to break the scan by cropping, extracting, renaming, mixing and then it works also

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:10:19 +0000

What exactly is a tagged PDF and where do I find one?

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 14:01:45 +0000

The three categories of PDFs you should be testing are scanned-image, untagged, and tagged. Nothing else.

A device that can’t reflow a tagged PDF is broken.