Only a bit related: does anyone know a) why it is standard in scientific papers to be written in 2-col layout and b) how to convert said 2-col layout to a READABLE 1-col layout?!
Man, this is driving me nuts on desktop and mobile.
Man, this is driving me nuts on desktop and mobile.
If you want to reflow arbitrary pdfs, then you should check out k2pdfopt ([2]). It's how I read academic papers on my Kindle. It does lots of tricks to slice out a useful format from pdfs of many different formats and make them pretty solid on a different screen size.
[1]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical...
For much the same reason as in newspapers: Because it maintains a readable text column width (in terms of words/characters per line) while increasing information density on the page. The other (less common) alternative uses one column with large text and large margins, with only slightly more words/characters per line as each column of the two-column format.