The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

I'm kinda sorta thinking about a Kindle, but for one specific purpose: to replace the mountains of PDFs of articles I keep printing out for class, for reading in places that I don't take my laptop. How well would that work out? Also concerning heavy use of highlighting.

People say PDF support is bad, but does that mean PDFs with graphics and stuff, or do boring, plain text PDFs also have trouble?

Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Dec 1, 2010

# ¿ Dec 1, 2010 09:27

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 17:16

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

Daric posted:

Is someone really going to ask about PDF support every other post?

In my defense I was asking about something that I hadn't seen mentioned yet, how highlighting worked for PDFs.

Also, why HAVE they been so slow to implement PDF support? It seems like the most natural thing in the world. Is Adobe developing their own portable PDF reader and trying to keep the others from beating them to the punch or something?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2010 19:03

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

I ended up ordering a $135 Kindle, a relatively cheap entry into this world of e-book readers. I hope it will serve me well while I am traveling for xmas as new year's.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2010 11:06

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

Adonis posted:

I have the 3G version and I don't think it's worth it, really. It would be if i traveled extensively away from Wifi i guess, but I don't.

I didn't even consider it because the places where I would use a device like this are either a) covered by wifi too (home, campus, a starbucks or something), or b) NOT covered by 3G (airplane).

edit: and inside the realm of places I would use it, there's an even SMALLER realm of places where I would actually need to download a new book or something, rather than just reading offline.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2010 01:14

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

Suntory BOSS posted:

Kindle opening reactions:

It's so TINY
Let me just remove this sticker...
That...that's not a sticker

Is that same reaction what the thread title is referring to?

This thing is amazing-- the quality of the screen is dazzling, surprising even after having read dozens of reviews singing its praises. The size, weight and feel is perfect.. the idea of an electronic book seemed really really dumb until I picked up a Kindle for the first time and started flicking through the user guide.

The Kindle is also incredibly dangerous. I found, purchased and downloaded a book in about a minute and a half-- my wallet is screwed.

Haha, I just got mine today too, but like I said before, I knew what to expect since I messed around with my friend's.

I wish the PDF reader had size options between screen fit and 150%. The documents I have to read all have really wide margins, but they always have some title text that goes right up against the upper left hand corner, and thus the Kindle can't automatically scale it to just the text I want to see. Holding it sideways makes it readable though.

Actual Kindle books are great to read though. I immediately went and grabbed the collected works of Mark Twain for $1.60 or so, I had been meaning to read a lot of those. But I suppose this PDF book on linguistic field methods must come first...

edit: I futzed around with stuff in Calibre and the best I can do is make the text readable but with spaces, line breaks and indents strewn all over every page.

Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Dec 14, 2010

# ¿ Dec 14, 2010 04:51

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

madprocess posted:

If you have text files that
are full of manual line breaks
like this.

Calibre will strip those out so that it flows naturally, so you don't get weird line breaks.

Can Calibre strip those kinds of problems from PDFs? I've been messing around with it a bit and all I can do is make a normal but somewhat squinty PDF into something that looks like it was written by a crazy person who loves the tab and enter keys carnally.

Samurai Sanders fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Dec 16, 2010

# ¿ Dec 16, 2010 00:22

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 17:16

Samurai Sanders: Nov 4, 2003; Pillbug

withak posted:

It may be that the wrecked formatting of a converted pdf is too crazy to fix automatically. It is a lot easier for a parser to notice and remove a linebreak every 80 characters or something.

Yeah, thats what I'm thinking. The other, much better solution seems to be to just turn the device sideways, when I do that it somehow grows a brain and actually stretches the text to fit the screen.

edit: do any of the buttons that are part of the main keypad of the device move through pages, or it is on the buttons on the side of the kindle? When holding it sideways they are not the most convenient way to turn pages.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2010 01:41

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > The eReader Megathread: Yes, all publishers hate Canada