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Re:PDF is not portable in the digital world by jrimbault on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @10:32AM (#14702680)
I think robert-zaremba is talking about screen size ? Not screen resolution.

IMO, reflowing text is big advantage if you're going for "portability accross screen sizes".

Re:PDF is not portable in the digital world by dragonwriter on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @11:51AM (#14703404)
> IMO, reflowing text is big advantage if you're going for "portability accross screen sizes".

It's a big advantage of your content is all pretty simple text; it's less useful for any other content. For complex content, you really need human attention to size-specific layout to getting anything better than just zooming content designed for one size.

Re:PDF is not portable in the digital world by mercer on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @10:52AM (#14702816)
Indeed. I love my iPad Mini and I use it for pdf's quite regularly (GoodReader is great for this), but it's just a tad too small to comfortably read A4-size documents, even on a retina screen. For many eBooks this is fine, but scientific papers are usually A4 and can be hard to read and annotate.

In some cases this can be fixed by cutting the margins, but aside from a certain unpleasantness I feel reading an almost-marginless document, it's often still not enough to comfortably read.

So for the most part, whenever possible, I go for ePub documents using Marvin (also an excellent app), and I print the larger documents.

It's one of the main reasons I'm considering getting a normal-sized iPad though.

Re:PDF is not portable in the digital world by jrimbault on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @10:56AM (#14702857)
I'm currently considering getting an iPad pro 12" for reading piano partitions. I'm sick of the stacks of large heavy old books laying on my piano and muffling the sound.

Does anyone here have a similar experience for that use case ? An iPad Pro seems large enough, but I don't really know. I've seen the Sony dpt-s2, but it seems very expensive given its limitations.

Re:PDF is not portable in the digital world by robert-zaremba on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @10:59AM (#14702879)
yes, screen size.

Most of the people will agree with me that straining your eyes is not a good solution ;) Little letters are not comfortable neither healthy.