What's wrong with PDFs!

[M@]

If you can argue the case for PDF's being bad: I'd like to see it!

They are great, nobody talks about them and before someone even considers doing so: someone else says, before they do, that they're bad.

Nothing wrong with PDF's.

Ahem.

Yes. PDF's are great.

[Sslixtis]

Yeah PDFs are great...once they've been through Repligo (http://www.cerience.com/products/)! PDFs are fine and dandy for PCs but they just don't cut it on a PPC. They just weren't made to fit a screen that small.

:twak:

Cheers!

[M@]

Erm.

Why shouldn't they not work well on P/PC's?

If you use the reflow button on the PC it'll fill that screen...?

[Sslixtis]

Some PDFs seem to work perfectly with reflow, but some insist on being difficult. And some just wont reflow properly AND have useful size font. But hey maybe I'm just spoiled. Repligo makes them seem as though they were made for the PPC. :lol:

I think as with most things in life, it is a matter of personal preference. I just find PDFs to be more trouble than they are worth on my PPC. There are just too many easy to use, feature packed readers available.

My http://www.anchoredbygrace.com/smileys/icon_penny.gif

[davidspalding]

PDF is a format for providing print-ready copies of documents which look and print regardless of computing platform. That is, Korova Moloko promotional pamphlet 1138 looks and prints the same on Window, Mac, Unix, Geoworks. Great for graphic-intensive, layout-intensive, and appearance-critical publications (marketing material, schematics, hypertext books with all of the above).

They're not really designed for "reading" on a thin, portable computing platform.

Sure, you can tweak and cram and stuff a PDF to be useful on a PDA ... but there are better ways, with less overhead, to read a doc on a PDA.

It's a matter of different application.

[thomas1973]

I like pdf on my PPC as well :D . I haven't had any problems with it, maybe I've just been lucky with my documents? Mind you, I haven't tried pdf-files larger than about 4 MB. But they've worked like a charm - pictures and all! I really liked the fact that the pictures are kept in their original size, so I could zoom in on them. This was a pdf dermatology file, so seeing details in the pics was vital for it to be of any use. I doubt that could be done on Repligo(?)

I also find the zoom feature working nicely, and the reflow, too. It's head and shoulders above PocketWord (which really suck at converting files! :evil: ) And I really like the fact that I don't have to convert anything, I just drag the original pdf file into my PPC folder!

This being said, I might just give Repligo a try, because of all the file formats it supportes, and the fact that Repligo compresses the files better.


Thomas.

[Kaber]

I'm loving .pdf on my ipaq. There's just so much out there in this format. It is useful to convert them sometimes, of course.

[jensenjb]

I posted a message a couple of weeks back about using .pdf files. My experience is that they are very sloooooow! If you don't agree, I double-dog-dare-you to try repligo and then tell me how fast you think the adobe viewer is. Don't take me up on the dare unless you are willing to shell out the $20 :wink:

Next to pocket informant, it is probably my favorite software on my PPC.

[Janak Parekh]

I posted a message a couple of weeks back about using .pdf files. My experience is that they are very sloooooow! If you don't agree, I double-dog-dare-you to try repligo and then tell me how fast you think the adobe viewer is. Don't take me up on the dare unless you are willing to shell out the $20 :wink:
Agreed. I lost, and had to shell out the money a while ago. :D

Anyway, to be more precise, there's nothing wrong with PDFs on Pocket PCs, except for the speed. RepliGo has about the same functionality as Adobe Acrobat Reader, except that (a) it's much smaller, (b) it's much much much much much much much faster, and (c) the RGO files are smaller. Did I mention faster? I am honestly not making this up at all.

--janak

[davidspalding]

BTW, aside from using them on PPC, I find that Adobe Acrobat 4 is grrrreat for making cross-platform docs of my resume, of files with tables and charts, ... and particularly , web pages. Using the web capture feature, I can import one -- or several -- pages from paid-access web sites, with working links to pages which I've also imported, and send the PDF to a friend for reading. Very handy. It's almost worth buying.

[hollis_f]

Sure, you can tweak and cram and stuff a PDF to be useful on a PDA ... but there are better ways, with less overhead, to read a doc on a PDA. If you know of a way I can take my Word docs (full of graphs, tables and pictures of chemical structures) from my desktop to my PPC that's better than PDF I'd love to hear it.

[thomas1973]

If you know of a way I can take my Word docs (full of graphs, tables and pictures of chemical structures) from my desktop to my PPC that's better than PDF I'd love to hear it.
I'm guessing 'Repligo' will come up again :wink: . I guess I will try it myself. I've come to value Janak's opinion on software highly - probably because it coincides with mine much of the time :lol:

I like Acrobat Reader (AR) for my PPC, and especially because it keeps all the formatting. but I've got some large pdf's (22-35 MB) that I want to use, and I think they will reveal the shortcomings of AR (speed). I wouldn't know, yet, as I'm still waiting for that 256 MB SD-card...


Thomas.

[Janak Parekh]

I like Acrobat Reader (AR) for my PPC, and especially because it keeps all the formatting. but I've got some large pdf's (22-35 MB) that I want to use, and I think they will reveal the shortcomings of AR (speed). I wouldn't know, yet, as I'm still waiting for that 256 MB SD-card...
I think you don't realize how much faster RepliGo is, then. I find it faster even for 200K PDFs. By an order of magnitude. If you've ever seen PDFs draw on the screen of the Pocket PC, imagine that step being absolutely instantaneous. That's RepliGo.

I hate to sound like a corporate shill, but the Cerience folks have absolutely done something right here, and it's revolutionized the ability to take documents (especially research papers to read) with me. By the way, you can easily convert most PDFs to RGO -- just print in Acrobat Reader to the Repligo printer.

--janak

[ChrisW]

For my needs and preferences, PDF is a tool of Satan. Sure, there are places it's worthwhile. Like, I need to renew my passport, and I can download the exact form for this.

Bur for reading documents? No way! On the PPC, PDF's goal of providing precise formatting and layout on all platforms is in direct conflict with the restrictions of the device. But even on the desktop, I hate it. More often than not, the fonts are unclear and hard to read at any resolution. Non-standard UI makes it hard to use. It's a relatively large application that refuses to leave your memory when you try to close it.

It's also a data black hole. No report that's published in it can ever be used for anything. So when someone sends me a PDF report whose data I need for another calculation, I'm stuck. I've got to re-type the data. If the report were in Excel or HTML or XML, I could actually use the data.

If you need a way to save a complex Word document, you could either use TextMaker on the PPC to read it directly, or export to HTML. And as far as encapsulating HTML or whole web sites, there are countless other solutions to this problem. My favorite is iSilo, but there are enough to satisfy any tastes.

[targetdrone]

I have Adobe Reader for the PPC, but I prefer not to use it if I don't have to. For any large PDF, I just convert it to .rtf with Acrobat and then open the exported .rtf file in Word and convert it to .lit format for MS Reader.

The .pdf's I've tried to read on the PPC require scrolling back and forth, back and forth, ad nauseum. Ugh! And it's too slow on top of that.