How is PDF-Reading on the N770?
 

Hi All!

Im considering to buy a N770 (actually im already in the must-have stage) and the main usage would be PDF Reading and light Websurfing (like checking the Wikipedia or reading online-books). I would like to use the device not necessarily only when im outside but also at home.
Now i made a 800x480 Window and put my PDF-Viewer into it, and this would be no problem, 800x480 is enough for all the PDFs.
But what about the physical size of the screen? I cut it out on cardboard and it is quite small.
Do you think i could read my PDFs comfortably on the N770 or is it only intended as a makeshift/emergency solution (not sure about the translation here) when you are on-the-go?

I am also a little concerned about the speed.
I use the PDF-Viewer Evince on my P3-500MHz Laptop and heard you can install Evince on the N770 also. How much slower would rendering be on the N770?

Thanks and greetings from germany,
Schmolch

Since the release of the IT2006 OS, PDF viewing has been much much better than previously. Overall load times, and times to change zoom level and pages are improved. I do use the N770 for reading PDF files. I kind of use it to store all that documentation that no longer comes in hardcopy.

The screen size is an issue. The formatting of PDF files varies so considerably that I find it difficult to read the text without zooming in. Changing pages using the hardware keys requires no more than 100% zoom, so flipping pages requires zooming out, turning the page, and zooming back in.

One thing I did for a couple PDFs is remove the margins in Acrobat, which I happen to own. This saves some screen real estate for the text. I briefly considered trying to find the ideal font size/page size for my personal needs, and reformatting my PDFs. But... I never did that.

Hi cobalt,

which PDF-Reader are you using, is it fbreader?
It seems a little weird that going to the next page requires zooming out first. Did you maybe try out the PDF-Viewer evince, if that is even possible?

[update] to give you some motivation to try evince :) i googled and the people who tried it are very happy with it and say its much better then the built-in reader :-)

Greetings,
Schmolch

hi schmolch,

fbreader does not read PDF-Files.
Evince is not working with OS 2006 (but someone is working on it), only with OS 2005.

greetings
rachid

afaik, Evince filled out the memory prerendering the pages to speed-up the reading. On the old OS05, it ever caused my N770 to reboot while reading large documents, it was only a matter of time.

PDF reading on the 770 is nice, but the build-in reader desparately needs a bookmarking function.

Try following: Full screen mode->Press menu key-> Choose from menu: Zoom page width. Then IMHO zoom level is readable. Now you can scroll up and down on the current page and also change pages with hardware keys.

I'll reiterate that the PDF reading has improved 1000% in the last update of the 770 software. It is quite functional as a PDF viewer now. The screen may be small but the resolution is quite crisp so it renders fonts smoothly down to microscopic sizes. If you have good eyesight then you can read quite wide pages of text. If you don't, it has a zoom feature to increase the font size but you will end up having to do a lot of annoying horizontal scrolling because of the nature of PDF's non-rewrapping of text.

PDFs are ideal for preserving formatting but sometimes the formatting preserved is not ideal for your chosen reading platform. There is an excellent ebook reading software available for the 770 called FBreader but it reads formats that can be rewrapped to fit the platform, not PDFs.

Thanks, that works great for PDFs with single-column text (like instruction manuals). Most journal articles are two column and are hard to read on the N770, but I would argue that they are hard to read on paper too.

I never did figure out how to install software to the N770, so I never tried evince on IT2005.

I haven't been able to open the PDFs I want to access on my Nokia, it pops up an out of memory error. I have 50 or so mb of swap enabled and the PDF is only around 1mb in size. I've seen others having this problem too.

OS2006, just newly flashed.

Gav