How do you use PDF’s?
By Paul Biba
A colleague of mine is a programmer and he’s getting tired of lugging huge programming books around. He has a number of these books in PDF form and has printed them out and put them in binders and carries them around. Yuck!
I tried loading them on my Sony Reader, but the Reader is just too slow for this (I presume the Kindle would have the same problem). He often wants to flip back and forth between pages, look at charts, etc. but this is really cumbersome on the Reader. We can use my Eee PC, but this is a bit awkward ergonomically. He is nuts; he likes reading programming books in bed, so he doesn’t want to use his laptop.
I’ve seen from a number of comments here that many of our readers use PDF textbooks a lot. How do you people do it? I don’t really like encouraging this guy to read programming texts in bed, but I guess it takes all kinds.
Advice?
July 7th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I use a normal laptop (ibook) on a bed tray.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Hi,
I’m also developper and waiting for an ebook reader.
Here is perhaps the temporary solution,
hopping just to get it in a simpler configuration, take a look to this:
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_details.php?id=16351
Regards,
July 8th, 2008 at 9:20 am
If you’ve got the cash and desire (I don’t), I would think that a tablet PC would be the way to go…it’s got the most ‘book-like’ feel to it, and I think it would be a lot less clunky in bed (or other favorite reading spots like a lounge chair at the cafe) than a traditional laptop.
July 8th, 2008 at 9:23 am
For programming books, I am a huge fan of Safari Bookshelf’s subscription service for O’Reilly.
I use my laptop in bed on a laptop desk ($20 @ walmart), which is sort of like a hospital bed table, or a WinMo phone.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:27 am
I am having all sorts of problems with PDF manuals, mainly because of the reading screen of my Iliad being too small.
I would never use, or recommend a laptop, as I am usually using this when I want open references to the manual, and I just can’t read the thing when I most want to (ie in my hand while I am propped up on the lounge.
A reader would be perfect, but for the problem of fit.
I have used CUTEprofessional to cut out margins making it a bit easier. I tried, and bought a number of software extractors but the results were not reliable.
I even tried to use OCR software to convert PDFs to HTML, which worked, but not with the reliability needed for technical manuals — the problem being the font attributes and rather primitive HTML mark-up which makes clean up tiresome.
I like the page format of PDF on the reader when it is matched to screen size (rather than the oddities of HTML - lines cut).
I am not happy with any solution at the moment. PDFs as they now stand are not flexible enough for the present handheld devices.
I think the solution is to wait for the epub format to mature and have better readers that support headers and footers and actual page breaks.
At the moment we are caught between the past and the future.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I avoid PDF’s like the plague unless I want to print it.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I read PDFs on my MacBook, using the Preview program that comes with the machine.
Believe it or not, it’s my current preferred format for reading most ebooks on the screen. The MacBook screen is big enough to display a page legibly in most cases, the laptop isn’t too bulky (and I have it with me a lot anyway); Preview is much more lightweight than the Adobe plugin; and the PDF is self-contained, so I can read a book offline without having to worry about whether I’ll have to click on something, and be attached to the network, to read the next part of the book. I can easily move the book as a single file to whatever folder I want to keep it in.
Other formats have their advantages as well, but PDF seems to work well for me for most current books. (If there were some equivalent to iTunes or iPhoto to manage books in various formats on one’s local machine, that would be great; I don’t currently know of one that’s as attractive to use.)