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Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

Is this suitable for reading technical pdf textbooks (math, programming, etc)? Last I checked the screen size was smaller than A4 and ReMarkable had a focus on writing and taking notes rather than displaying books...

So any suggestions here?

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IMHO, it's too small for PDFs. If they offered an 13" / A4 / Letter sized version for a few hundred more, I'd buy it today. Instead I'm using a 13" iPad Pro which has different compromises.

perhaps you can try a BOOX Tab X 13.3" e-paper tablet.

I'm not buying anything from Onyx until they come into compliance with the GPL.

I've mostly used it for reading textbooks or academic papers (and taking notes on them) and it works fine for me. It can be a little small but you can zoom in if you need

I've had a remarkable tablet. I'm very much waiting for the Supernote A4 x2. There's also BOOX Tab X and BOOX Max 3 if you want a 13.3" today.

I check the Reddit post (iykyk) every month for updates on the Supernote A4.

It still says this year!! :fingers-crossed:

There's no way they'll make it to this year. It took them a year to get A5X2 from prototype design to "shipping in September".

For those not in the know, here's the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Supernote/comments/rxddxj/some_info...

I know but even moving that to prototype stage this year would be amazing. I’m in no rush just excited, and very prepared to be disappointed by the time estimates

PS Thanks, I was on mobile, I wouldn’t be able to have found the link

I read arxiv content on the Remarkable 2 and I am satisfied. The reader auto-removes the white margins, so the smaller screen is not a problem. The zoom functionality is snappy for an e-ink device from 3 years ago (slow by modern standards). The quick-view thumbnails used to scroll through far-away pages is sufficient for my workflow. Generally I am very happy with the device for consuming static academic PDFs.

From my past research 13" is the minimum I'd be comfortable with for a tablet that is tailored for research papers. The only one that seemed just right was the Sony DP-1 or (DPT equivalent) though it was around 1000 USD and Windows only compatible (for file sync and what have you).

Kindle Scribe is fine for b/w research papers, while having two paperback book pages side by side in landscape mode (switch to unjustified text with smallest margins, change to size 3 Bookerly text, add a click of line spacing, switch on page numbers instead of location), makes a lovely improvement in book reading.

That is the only thing I use mine for these days. Screen size is fine for that.

I miss an API to their cloud storage. It is simply a dealbreaker that it aims to help avoiding distractions but leaves no room for building an automated workflow around it.

It's designed as a reading tablet with good pen support, so yes. And E-ink makes reading more comfortable than LCDs. For technical PDFs, size matters a lot. Normal reading tablets often resize the text to be easily readable, but PDFs cannot do that. So having a tablet of good size becomes a dealbreaker for such use-cases, more so than other features.

Remarkable lacks a backlight, and e-ink displays don't have deep blacks, so depending on your reading environment, it may be a bit low-contrast. I got a kobo elipsa myself for this reason. Kobu is notably cheaper and has a backlight which helps the contrast a bit, but the pen support is waaay worse.

From experience,reading the screen size is not a problem at all.

But writing is where you notice how small the screen really is.

It’s down to the size difference between printed text and handwriting.

Just reading, it's okay. For annotating it's close to useless. I'd suggest a Supernote or a real tablet.

Remarkable is very open source friendly and you can ssh into it from the get go.

I'm really looking forward to installing Zed on this thing!

depends on source of books I find, and perhaps also if you have eye strain issues, I need to read mine with my glasses often, which is irritating. But the zooming in can often leave you with text being too big to fit on the display.

So I sort of feel like I should love it more, but this bit makes it annoying for me.

It honestly depends on you. I used a Google Nexus 7 as a textbook and paper display during university back in the day and while in some cases you needed to zoom in overall it was fine. I don't have any experience with this remarkable but purely from a screen size perspective, if your eyes are healthy and you're willing it should be fine.

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