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Comment by sigkill | Hacker News Reader

For a fullpage 2 column PDF, I find even the 10" 16:9 to be a bit small. 4:3 is way better.

How would you read PDFs on a 7" 16:9.

It's hard to build a single device that suits all these use cases equally well. That's why I think in the long run all the big players are going to have to support multiple formats.

I completely agree with you. For something that would use Google currents, I can see myself using a 7-inch tablet. But I think it's going to be quite a while till everyone supports reflowable PDFs.

I don't see PDFs running away anytime soon, unless someone comes with a better format that can support print and screen simultaneously.

I use Latex, and with some tinkering you can render your documents to both PDF and epub. The problem would be with designers and people working with tools that are not as flexible as Latex.

I've found an even better solution for my LaTeX documents: I have several different sty files for different screen sizes. However, critically, they all generate PDFs. Why? Basically, it looks much better than an epub file (at least on my Kindle). The text is justified properly, it uses a nicer typeface and math looks great (actually, I have no idea of what math looks like in epub form).

Also, (once again Kindle-specific), epubs are bad for languages that are not English. Particularly, I'm thinking about Russian: I have some Russian books in epub and they look horrible. The problem is that words are never broken between two lines which leads to an absurdly jagged margin. Since Russian often has longer words than English, this is actually a big problem. I think something like TeX's automatic hyphenation would make the experience much better.

However, generating epub files also seems like it has merit. I'll have to try it some day. Is there some special tool that just extracts the content but not the style information, or do you have a special style for epub files? It would also be great if you could provide some relevant links.

Nit: It's 16:10, but I agree that 4:3 is a great aspect ratio for tablets, especially if it is being used for reading. I really wish there were more 4:3 tablets around.

I really like the 4:3 ratio on my 8 inch Vizio tablet; so much so that I've been avoiding upgrading to Honeycomb. Android 3's onscreen toolbar would definitely throw off the usable aspect ratio.

PDF is a pain to read on the majority of mobile devices. Even Kindle. Its lack of reflowing makes it impossible to adapt to various smaller screen sizes and efficiently use screen space and change text size. It's becoming a real pain point.

PDF is pain to read anywhere, including wide screen desktop monitors.

Well on my low DPI 1680x1050 (16:10) 22" monitor I can fullscreen PDFs and two pages are visible in one go. It's readable.

Haha, true, though at least on my laptop I can full-screen it zoom the content to the screen edges, and invert the colors to get dark bg/light text. It's at least serviceable that way. Nothing like it (or at least that easy) on Kindle, Android, etc. that I know of.

There are some PDF readers on Android that are much better than stock. "Night Mode" on ezPDF Reader (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=udk.android.re...) might do what you want.

I can totally vouch for nightmode on ezPDF. The only place it borks out is around equation boxes which, I think are images anyway.

I don't find PDFs to be a problem on an iPad unless the PDF publisher has done something wacky (nonstandard paper sizes is a big one).

Never had an android device, but I would imagine vertical scroll on landscape orientation would be perfect.

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