[COFF] Reading PDFs on a mobile. (Was: Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.)

[Tomasz Rola]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 11:02:33AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Mar 2023, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> 
> > Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2023 04:15:33
> > From: Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>
> > To: coff at tuhs.org
> > Subject: [COFF] Reading PDFs on a mobile. (Was: Requesting thoughts on
> >     extended regular expressions in grep.)
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Grant wrote:
> > > Even inventorying and keeping track of the books can be time
> > > consuming. -- Thankfully I took some time to do exactly that and have
> > > access to that information on the super computer in my pocket.
> > 
> > I seek recommendations for an Android app to comfortably read PDFs on
> > a mobile phone's screen.  They were intended to be printed as a book.
> > In particular, once I've zoomed and panned to get the interesting part
> > of a page as large as possible, swiping between pages should persist
> > that view.  An extra point for allowing odd and even pages to use
> > different panning.
> 
> Sorry for responding to an old thread got behind on my list-mail
> reading, but I wanted to share my $.02.
> 
> Someone else mentioned an e-book reader app, and I second that,
> mostly...Moon+ Reader on Android is the e-book reader I've been using
> for a while and it does a good job with standard e-book formats
> as well as PDF files, IF the PDF is a PDF of formatted text.  It
> even has a mode where it will do a pretty decent job of on-the-fly
> converting/reformatting the text of the PDF to something that can
> actually be read on a small (phone) screen.  However, if the PDF is just
> a bunch of 1 image per page wrapped in a PDF container, you're out of
> luck and back to zoom/pan around the page.
> 
> For most of my digtal book reading these days, I use a Boox e-ink
> reader.  It runs Android, so, I can use the same e-book reader I used
> on my phone.  It can even sync where you're at in the book/document via
> dropbox and you can move between multiple devices if needed.
> 
> If I want to mark-up the PDF, the built-in stuff on the Boox handles
> that nicely.  If I'm on my phone, I use an app called Xodo.
> 
> -- 
> Michael Parson
> Pflugerville, TX

Hello Michael,

I am not challenging your choices (to each his/her own), but to add
some alternative, my own preferences go toward:

a. have sd card slot in a reader (I mean hardware with e-ink, not some
app on a phone). This means a card can be slipped into the box without
opening it. This means the box is not water-proof. However, I had a
look inside and I suspect it can still be water-prooved with duct
tape, if someone wants it so much.

b. so far I was rather happy with Linux custom made by manufacturer,
but not an Android - I am yet to try Android based ebook reader (but
maybe not too fast). Phones with A* are rather lousy at keeping their
batteries loaded, I wonder how eink devices fare - do they, too, need
to be recharged every day? My reader is recharged every 2-3 weeks,
when batt drops to about 70%, while I keep using it at least every
second day for few hours at a time.

I had once (many years go, when I was to buy my first reader) a dream
of browsing web pages with it. However, built in browser in non-A*
reader proved to be lousy, equally lousy to browser in A* phones that
I have tried. So, my current ereader was never connected to the net
because I see no point. Of course each model nowadays comes with
wi-fi, it just does not add anything useful so no need to even
configure it on home router etc. Nowadays, I would rather convert
whatever to pdf or epub and upload to the reader. Reading wikipedia
pages printed to pdf saved me plenty of grief, as opposed to trying
them in a (builtin) browser. I suspect elinks could look much better,
but trying this requires some free time (compiling/porting,
uploading).

As a side note, I have observed that some pdfs do not render too well
on my reader - it seems that they make this software "too new" to be
solid & fast nowadays. Same pdfs converted to djvu read like a dream,
however. Having more than few supported book formats is nice.

My reader also comes with BT, possibly meant to connect headphones but
perhaps usable for BT keyboard. Might be a thing to try in a future
(or not), I mention it to let others know there may be such an option
in case they care about it (I really do not, but I do not make those
things so what can I do...).

HTH

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **