Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gbog 5376 days ago
It seems to me that PDF is not a format suitable for much more than printing on paper.

A very important feature of Kindle is to allow choosing font size. It make it an ideal tool for elders. But PDF documents have a fixed layout that won't allow resizing font conveniently, or you have to break it in pieces.

2 comments

You are right. But, I have an extensive library of PDF files that I'd like to read. I expect many people do too. Most are technical documents with equations, graphs and other images. I would love to have an e-ink based reader that will render such documents correctly.

But, Amazon are probably more interested in selling their content, so I understand the lack of PDF support.

I have an older Kindle DX which can do technical PDFs. Aside from the cost (nowadays triple the smaller Kindle), it's still not entirely satisfactory for three reasons:

- It's cumbersome to do anything other than reading sequentially.

- The screen is still not big enough for letter/A4 pages - it does perform decent scaling, but you know how scrunched many technical papers are. Can go landscape and read half a page, which is a pain in two column layouts ...

- It's a tad heavy, almost like a hardcover textbook that needs to be held in both hands.

I understand PDFs aren't a great format for books, but there are some cases in which it'd be fantastic to have them on an e-reader.

For graphical content, such as technical drawings/illustrations, wireframes or just B&W document proofs, the resolution and fidelity of an E-Ink Pearl screen combined with the true WYSIWYG nature of the PDF format across digital/print would be a dream come true for me...