Problem rendering PDFs!

[Tomato29]

Hi I am taking a class at MIT this semester were all the material is provided as PDF's yet all of them seem to be rendered horrible in my Nook, I even transformed it to ePub using calibre and tried it and didn't get better results. WTF?

Why???

Here is the PDF in question

http://mit.edu/6.01/mercurial/spring10/www/handouts/readings.pdf

Do I have to Jailbreak my nook and write my own code or are you guys getting your act together?

What about just using http://sourceforge.net/projects/andpdf/ to open pdfs!...

I have to say beautiful hardware but you guys seem to suck at programming! Here maybe take this class

it will help you

http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp08/6.005/materials.html

and this one for better GUI's!

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-831Fall-2004/CourseHome/inde...

[Simon_Jones]

I'm assuming you have a problem with the various overlaying images.  In order for those to display correctly, you must set the font size to "small."  This is the nook's full screen mode for PDFs, with no reflow.  Your file will display just fine, albeit a bit hard to read.  (But don't let that stop you from writing a nook PDF reader with zooming/scrolling.)

The only other way to fix this problem is to have the original source file that the PDF was created from (or rebuild it yourself by stripping out the contents to some other layout program), and enlarge the text size.  To further optimize for the nook screen, when printing the PDF the paper dimension should be proportional to 6 x 7.3 (600 x 730 pixels being the maximum view area available to PDF/eBooks.)

It's a lot of work, but this difficulty is not the fault of the nook per se, arising instead from the nature of the PDF format itself... it's not designed for reflow.

[Tomato29]

So we should assume that Pdfs that are not ment for the nook will never be rendered properly? So its a waste of money for research papers, and any pdf publications??

This blows

[Jeffell]

Hey Tomato,

I had the same concerns with PDFs. The fix I used was to save the PDF as an html and then import using Calibre.

Could you try that on one of your really intense text books and tell how it goes then? I'd be curious to know. I don't think we need yet another PDF reader, but I have some fairly complex PDFs, too, and this fix seemed to work the best.

That is, if the PDF didn't contain a lot of tables and complex things.

[Holly_Snowe]

I have a thought I'd like to throw out, just in case you find it to be helpful...

This isn't the first time I've heard ereader complaints about PDFs, and they almost always come from scientists like my husband or the engineers they work with. I'm a heavy reader, have no need to keep textbooks with a lot of figures on my nook, and only use the Documents section to hold a few recipes so the nook is fantastic for me, but if you're really interested in something you can both work and play with, the nook might not be the device for you. Have you ever heard of the QUE? Plastic Logic was swamped at the consumer electronics show in Vegas when they introduced it. Critics love it and it does a lot of things the nook can't. It's more than twice the price for a base (8G) model, but it was built with professional use in mind and I think it's really pretty.

http://www.que.com/

[LarryOnLI]

Exactly Holly,

The PDF support works acceptably for text but poorly for graphics intensive pages. Also a lot of technical material is very dependent on color rendering.

If you are a professional user requiring text books or other graphic intense technical documents and PDfs then you might be better off choosing the kindle DX, Plastic Logic QUE, or even the Apple iPad (which I am sure will display full page color PDFs beautifully).

[Holly_Snowe]

Scratch that price on the base model...I was wrong. The 'smaller' one is 4GB and only has wifi for $650. The 8GB is $800 and has 3G coverage just like the nook. It's a eink-type touch screen, which is what we were all thinking the ipad would be and...wasn't. It seems like a nook and an ipad rolled into one machine. 

[Simon_Jones]

---

Tomato29 wrote:

So we should assume that Pdfs that are not ment for the nook will never be rendered properly? So its a waste of money for research papers, and any pdf publications??

This blows

---

No.  You should assume that PDFs might not work well on *all current e-ink based tech*, because e-ink isn't fast enough to allow scrolling.  You won't see any better results on the Kindle 2.  Kindle DX would work a lot better because of its bigger screen size, but you're looking at an investment roughly equal to an iPad.

If you modify the PDF to actually fit the nook screen and make the font size readable on a 600 x 730 screen area, the results would look just fine.  Yes, this is an extra step, but it's not all that hard to do.

[harkinat0r]

I, like you, wanted to read pdfs for my classes on my Nook to save paper and make it easier to keep track of many pdfs at once.  The problem I had is that one professor was scanning both pages of an open book into one page in the pdf (with large black borders around them).  These pdfs take up my entire 15" laptop screen so you know they were far too small to read when opened on my Nook's 5" screen.  The best workaround I've found (sorry this is Mac only) is to open them in preview.  Using the select tool, select around the text on the left hand page leaving only very slight margins.  Then, click on any of the pages in the sidebar column (this will not lose your selected text).  Select all (command + a or edit - select all).  Crop (command + k or click crop in one of the menus).  Save as (I save this one as "left" because it is the left-hand pages).  Then repeat this process for the right-hand pages (starting again with the full right and left page document).  Now, with the left and right document open side-by-side, change the view to the grid of thumbnails and drag the right-hand pages each into their correct locations in relation to the left-hand pages.  This can be tedious if you have documents over 100 pages because it means that you are dragging 50 right-hand pages into place but for the documents that I've worked with, this is a quick process.  Save as whatever you want the name of your document to be on the Nook.  Then, just drop this document onto your Nook and since you have cropped out just the text, it will fit the portrait-shaped screen.  This method works very well and I have used it several times.

[GeoffreyF]

Tomato29 - Grow up!

You never described the problem you are having with the PDF's but I'll assume it is the image files.  

PDF's in general are notorious for not doing well in electronic forms.   The reason is that the format is intended originally for printing on a piece of paper that has a well defined size, 8 1/2 x 11 typically.   Clearly the Nook is not that.    A PDF can contain images of various different formats too, not all of which work everywhere.

However, a PDF that is coded for a flexible display size does pretty well.   Images are another story.   Do you actually think (You better start doing this if you are at MIT) that those kind of fine line images will just scale to suit your needs? Color images can be an even tougher problem.  The nook only has 16 levels of Gray.  It's about text.

Where exactly does the nook say "Excellent for any random PDF you have including research papers".

Why do you think that jail breaking the thing is going to do anything but void the warranty?   You obviously don't understand image scaling so I don't that you will accomplish anything anyway.  

Grow up and use the nook for it's intended purpose (none of its competitors will do better) or take it back and don't bother us with your angst.   I have been using the Nook very successfully but then again, I haven't tried using it for purposes that nobody would reasonably expect it to be good at.

[Tomato29]

GeogreyF

Grow up? Asking that a product works as advertised is something completely reasonable. 

Yes I understand that for images it wont work well and I wasn't expecting it to, but for simple

graphs and equations it should do fine. 

The fact is that we got sold a product that is not nearly finished, full of bugs, and half ass features:

•  You can't jump to a particular pages

•  There is no good way of organizing books or browsing, example: by author, genre, folder, date

It can handle according to their specs up to 1500 ebooks in the 2GB memory included, how the heck do you manage a library that size with the features that the nooks gives you??

• Bookmarks get lost

• PDFs are rendered poorly 

Example: http://mit.edu/6.01/mercurial/spring10/www/handouts/readings.pdf 

Look at the index in the first page its rendered so poorly in the nook, the formatting feature should have a good way of fixing indexes to fit in a nook. By page 4 the nook changes completely the way the pages are rendered, and you can't even read them. Then it changes back to some "Readable area" but the font is to large for me, so if I change it down from medium to small it goes from readable to impossible to see.

• Very tight borders thats make some books very annoying to read 

Example: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8578/pg8578.epub

• Lack of fonts and sizes. I had some books that went from really big to really small 

• No support for some non ascii characters

• After disconnecting from Laptop the last PDF you were reading is "currently not available" so you have to go out to the main menu and hit reading now.

And Barnes and Noble does say it Supports PDFs: "http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/techspecs/?cds2Pid=30195"  

Which I take it to mean that it can handle normal 8 1/2 x 11 documents which is the most standard documents that you will find out there.

Look at this PDF: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf

Its a standard research paper, no graphs, no fancy equations only two **bleep**ing columns, and you can't read it at all after the abstract, not with any font size.

Also just because you can't do anything once you Jailbreak a nook it doesn't mean that the rest of us can't. The reason why I got a nook instead of a Kindle was mainly because it run's on android so I can add new programs to it, change it, and improve it.

[Simon_Jones]

Tomato29-->

There are many legit criticisms which can be levied against nook, but most of the problems you perceive with PDF come from your own misunderstanding of what that format is, and the capabilities of e-ink.  I'll try to address some of your concerns, on good faith that you are not just here to whine...

>You can't jump to a particular pages

It is up to the author of the file to include links to chapters or individual pages.  The nook has no trouble with the bookmarks/table of contents in PDF or ePub.

>PDFs are rendered poorly

They render *accurately* in full-screen mode.  The problems you're running into are related to the PDF reflow function.  Reflow is not what PDFs are designed to do.  PDF is a printing format; all elements are essentially vector images (hence we "print" PDF files when we create them).  It is practically an image file.  Elements within PDF, even text, are *not* designed to be rearranged, resized, or modified in any way.  Therefore, it is up to the author of the PDF file to optimize the file for the nook.

(I've taken your 6.01 course file, run it through Acrobat then Open Office, and upped the text size.  It now reads beautifully, even the non-standard characters.  There are cheap commercial programs designed specifically to convert PDF into Word files, which you can edit and then print as PDF.  I suggest you look into them.)

>Very tight borders thats make some books very annoying to read

This is Guttenberg's own oversight.  Their ePub files lack proper margin spacing.

>No support for some non ascii characters

Ironically, this is not an issue for PDFs that have embedded fonts.  I've been able to get the nook to display even Japanese and Chinese characters correctly.

>Look at this PDF: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/AIM-1293.pdf

Its a standard research paper, no graphs, no fancy equations only two **bleep**ing columns, and you can't read it at all after the abstract, not with any font size.

It renders just as I expect it would in full screen mode.  It shows up correctly for me.

>Also just because you can't do anything once you Jailbreak a nook it doesn't mean that the rest of us can't. The reason why I got a nook instead of a Kindle was mainly because it run's on android so I can add new programs to it, change it, and improve it

Don't let any of us stop you.  I myself would appreciate even a minimal PDF zooming function for the nook.

[Tomato29]

I know that even though PDFs weren't created specifically for this, there most be some modifications that can be made to the files to make them readable in a nook such as fixing margins, indexes, treating columns as pages etc.

The function of jumping to a particular page seems really ridiculous that it doesnt exist, its sort of like saying that if an author didn't specifically put page numbers in a book, then pages can't be counted. The nook should be able to know what a page for itself is and use those as metrics or at worst the pages in the original file as it would be rendered normally. The second option seems like the easiest fix, but I would prefer the first one since who really cares how a book is rendered in another medium/ebook.

what about Fonts/sizes/zoom??

[GeoffreyF]

I cannot believe I'm explaining this to an MIT student.   However, you can code a PDF that will print out the same ... probably as many ways as there are programmers to do it.

For one particular example: Some PDF's actually code the text as an image.    This is done especially with foreign language fonts or with a lot of math equations.   A PDF can be coded to make margins etc. explicit and the rest of it is coded with an expectation of those parameters.   Many documents are coded quite rigidly so that the text cannot be re-justified.   If you look at the PDF coding of such documents, each character might be positioned and it can be quite hard to reverse the PDF into a text stream - which would be necessary for it to look proper on something like a nook.  PDF also allows for the fact that a document publisher may not want it to display in anything but a particular page size.   It is possible to code a PDF so it is very hard to re-process.  Generally this involves providing positioning information for almost individual characters rather than rely on the display processing Hyphenation and Justification ... that positioning information must be removed but sometimes the text stream is not even in the order it will be read in.

Zoom in a device with the slow refresh rate of eInk would be utterly ridiculous to use.

Engineering is full of tradeoffs.   With the nook, the main thing is the eInk which makes it (for me) easier to read.   An LCD type device with a larger screen might be more suited to your needs.

Take a look at how the documents you have are coded ... really THINK about how you would make the kind of conversions you expect.  who knows, maybe you can come up with something instead of just whine about it.   However, it introduces problems that have existed in electronic document formats for decades.   I've tried and trust me, a general solution is not as easy as you seem to want to think.

[Wrennie]

Tomato....it sounds like you need an iPad....

[LarryOnLI]

---

Wrennie wrote:

Tomato....it sounds like you need an iPad....

---

Actually much as I love my nook, this is the best answer. The iPad would be better suited to the display of heavily formatted PDF files than the nook.

Remember - the right tool for the job.

[Simon_Jones]

>I know that even though PDFs weren't created specifically for this, there most be some modifications that can be made to the files to make them readable in a nook such as fixing margins, indexes, treating columns as pages etc.

No.

Converting PDF into an editable/reflowable file such as Word or HTML requires processing power and time.  Even with my Intel i7 computer and Adobe Acrobat Pro, it took a few minutes to convert your 5 MB file.  The resulting file was 28MB.  This cannot be done on the fly.

>The function of jumping to a particular page seems really ridiculous that it doesnt exist, its sort of like saying that if an author didn't specifically put page numbers in a book, then pages can't be counted.

Agreed.  This is something BN can easily add, and should.  But it is still incumbent on the file author to add a useful index to the PDF.  Also, nook supports in-document hyperlinks.  Your course sheet was easily navigable this way.

>what about Fonts/sizes/zoom??

See, that's not the problem you think you have.  The nook can resize the text in PDF, which is impressive enough as it is.  It just throws everything else out of whack... multiple image layers, complex tables, etc.

Convince your professors to make ebook-friendly versions of their course files.  Or get a laptop.

[Tomato29]

Why would zoom not work? yes refresh rate is bad but come on! just set it to 150% 75% and stick to it.

What about a better article/book browser?

Again font size sometimes go from too big to too small

I wont mention PDF's again since you guys seem to think an engine to change them to make them "better" is impossible

[icebike2]

have you tried making your pdf's into txt then opening it with open office and moving stuff around then converting it back to PDF with open office? it works for me... sometimes but its a pain.

I'm doing some stuff atm but later too night ill try and post a step by step for modifying PDF files. 

[Simon_Jones]

>Why would zoom not work?

Who said zooming wouldn't work?  I've already sent in my suggestion for a very simple zoom implementation to BN (basically, bisect the page horizontally, rotate 90 degrees, display on nook screen in landscape mode.)  I sure hope someone over there has gotten it.

What *wouldn't* work is your suggestion of a fixed 150% zoom.  The document would exceed the screen size, so you would have to scroll around to view it.  *That's where refresh rate becomes a problem.*

>you guys seem to think an engine to change them to make them "better" is impossible

And you seem to think this is a software-only problem.  It is clearly not.