28 Jan
2011
28 Jan
'11
9:46 a.m.
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Joachim Thiemann
<joachim.thiemann at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 09:01, Tom Uban <uban at
ubanproductions.com> wrote:
I have that problem with letter-sized scans on my 7" Android tablet -
I'm trying to read Byte magazines, and the 800x480 resolution just
can't render the text legibly in full-page mode. It's a bit better
with half-pages in landscape orientation, but for page-at-a-time, I
can only really read headline text and the banners on advertisements.
Of course I can zoom in, but then I'm scrolling all over the page to
read columnar text the articles are set in, and the little 750MHz ARM
processor is not swift at manipulating 80MB-300MB PDFs. I'm sure it
would do a much better job at rendering its own text from OCRed
material or from clean (non-bitmapped) textual PDFs.
- are the documents in a format which is
presentable on these devices?
I have a 6-inch Kindle; while it does read PDFs well, the small screen
makes reading standard Letter sized documents a bit of a hassle to
read. Either it's eye-killingly small or you have to scroll all over
the place. ISTR that decoding a large page in a PDF can be quite
slow and slow to
scroll, too. ?I think (non-e) paper still wins on this one.
It's not just the ePaper - I have slow decodes and scrolling on an LCD
attached to a "mobile" processor.
Maybe the various pads will be
better for these tasks; faster cpus and touchscreens will help.
Perhaps an iPad has enough horsepower and real estate and resolution,
but a cheap (sub-$200) Android tablet is not quite good enough,
unfortunately.
-ethan