Pocket Anywhere News Via E-Mail

[Brad Adrian]

<a href="http://www.pocketanywhere.com/index.php">http://www.pocketanywhere.com/index.php</a><br /><br />Pocket Anywhere has announced a new way for us to read the news they collect about the mobile computing world. You can now download and read their new Pocket Anywhere PDF Journal. This monthly newspaper includes all kinds of reports, articles and reviews, most of which is not even available on the Pocket Anywhere Web site.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/adrian/pocketanywhere.jpg" /><br /><br />"The PDF and newspaper edition will give PDA users something different to read", said Publisher and Editor Jim McCarthy, adding "it's a product that feels real, is informative, and easier to pass-around with other pda friends."<br /><br />As the name implies, this digital newspaper is in PDF format, so you need the <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readerforppc.html">free Adobe Acrobat Reader</a> to view it. You can <a href="http://www.pocketanywhere.com/?content=pdf">download the free October issue</a> from the Pocket Anywhere site and sign up to receive subsequent monthly editions via e-mail.<br /><br />I couldn't quite figure out if it's easier to view the document (all 900kb of it) with the Acrobat Reader set to Autoflow on or off, so you may have to experiment with that a bit. However, there's no question that this is a very nice step in the world of mobile e-documents.

[nosmohtac]

I like many of the features of acrobat reader. I prefer to read documents with the reflow on so there is no need to move the scroll bars back and forth.
With this said, I will always try and find the document in any other format before downloading it in pdf format.
I had the lord of the rings collection on my pocket pc in pdf format. The four books took up almost 17MB of my storage card. I found the whole series in .txt format ran it through Microsoft Word with the reader add-in to convert the document to lit format and the same four books take up less than 2MB. What could possibly cause that big of a difference in a text document.

[JonnoB]

What could possibly cause that big of a difference in a text document.

Non-native fonts.

[portus]

I like many of the features of acrobat reader. I prefer to read documents with the reflow on so there is no need to move the scroll bars back and forth.

That is the purpose of the "reflow" plug-in function.

With this said, I will always try and find the document in any other format before downloading it in pdf format.
I had the lord of the rings collection on my pocket pc in pdf format. The four books took up almost 17MB of my storage card. I found the whole series in .txt format ran it through Microsoft Word with the reader add-in to convert the document to lit format and the same four books take up less than 2MB. What could possibly cause that big of a difference in a text document.

Most publications would embed special fonts to preserve the glyphs that was originally intended. These fonts could be big in size if not having been subset.

An alternative is to use a third-party software pdf2html to convert the PDF file to html format so you can use something like iSilo to read the resulting file, which has the closest look and feel to the original document.

[Foo Fighter]

I used to enjoy Jim McCarthy's articles, but ever since he went on his anti-Palm, doom and gloom tirade, the quality dropped off. Of course, Palm certainly didn't help things by sending their lawyers after him, I know that would piss me off royally, but still... :?

[palmsolo]

You can also use the TeamOne Reader to read pdf files, although the formatting is lost. However, it is fairly fast and has some nice options (i.e. bookmarking, annotations, etc.)

[Sven Johannsen]

You'd think they could write the thing with the reflow tags already in it. I have my conversion filter turned off, so my PPC copy came across as is, without any tags at all (reflow grayed out). The filter does it's best to insert tags appropriately, but it is not always that intelligent, which is why it is turned off. As I understand it creating the document in Acrobat 5 allows the tags to be inserted by the producer, hopefully making the resulting experience better.