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

If you use pdf reader at all, please go and vot bug number 737 at maemo bugzilla.

It asks nokia to move the middle navigation button to be next page button. This means that you can change page while in fullscreen and zoomed mode. MUCH more convinient if nokia would change that.

Please go, login (create account if needed) and vote!

Also, comment on the issue / make recommendations.

https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=737

I am reading during holidays a pdf book (around 800 pages) on my Nokia 770 OS 2006 ! With a zoom of 200% is really reading. During the spare moments I could allready read around 200 pages without any complaints, ...

Ok, a bookmark functionality would be great, but since I never power of the device (unless it crashes ofcourse), the book stays open all the time, and I can immediately continue reading the book.

Cheers, Jan

Does the 2006 PDF Viewer have a way to rotate the pages? I can't seem to find it, but for a book-style PDF it would make a lot more sense, I think.

Nope, but file that as a bug in bugzilla and hopefully the future version will have such.

evince is now available for 2006, including djvu support :-)

Just downloaded an tested:

1) There is a stupid bug: the tool-bar hide function does not work and thereafter the screen adjust is mistified.

2) It is terrible slow. New pages get a lot to render. The keyboard lasts seconds to appear (when browsing to desired page).

3) As the built-in PDF-reader, there is no option to select own zoom percentage. There are only some electable choices.

4) Bad navigation with keys, even worse than the usual PDF-reader.

How is everybodys experience with djvus?
I tried to make my own djvus from scanned images but its even slower than a PDF consisting of those scanned images.
And i dont know who is to blame, djvu the format, evince's djvu implementation or my djvus.

I tried evince and it crashed when opening a PDF (one of my Rails ebooks).

Yes here too.
It works better if you start it from a xterm, but still, i am very disappointed about evince. It crashes, its slow and you have to pray your nokia wont reboot if you open a pdf.

Sucks :-(

After several weeks my conclusion of "How is pdf reading on the 770?" is:
Absolutely horrible.
The builtin-reader allows you to read a few pages of a very simple pdf, everything more will piss you off so much that you want to throw your 770 against the wall.
Evince, the great pdf-reader you know from your Desktop-Linux sucks even more on the 770, its slower and crashes/freezes/reboots your 770 almost 100% reliably on every pdf after some usage.

If you have to read your pdfs on the 770 you better convert them to jpg-galleries and view them with opera.

It's perfect for reading not complex pdfs like books. I use fbreader and pdftohtml. Fbreader is a real ebook reader with library, bookmarks, large fonts, portrait mode...

From de 770 command line:
$ pdftohtml -noframes pdffile.pdf
$ gzip pdffile.html

And finally open using fbreader :)

If by "not complex pdfs" you mean simple txt-files that somebody converted to pdf then yes, the 770 can handle those very well. *applauds*

Well, if default pdf viewer was able to cut white margins at left and right sides, i would find it quite usable: https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=761 (feel free to vote for this feature request :))

No, I didn't mean simple txt-files that somebody convert to pdf, just normal books that are in pdf format. *applauds* *applauds*

Just try it.

try it?
I use the 770 primarily as a Reader. I have hundreds of pdfs and several hours every day i read on the 770.
The built-in reader has a good rendering speed if you consider the slow CPU, i give it that, but it craps out very fast if your pdf contains pictures or is a little bigger, then it runs out of memory or freezes/reboots the 770 (which is not acceptable).
Evince has some nice features which the builtin doesnt (contiunous mode, better fullscreen-mode) but it is slower and way more unstable.

I tried it, it sucks, and thats why i had to convert 90% of my pdfs to jpg-galleries, they are 10 times bigger in filesize but with a 2GB Card its not a problem and i can view them faster and stable in opera then i could otherwise.

That sounds like an interesting way to circumvent the pdf hassle on the 770. I wonder if it would be possible to turn this into a python script with a gui frontend. It could present the user with a simple file open-dialog and would perform your operations on the selected file, ending with opening it in fbreader.

Is it possible to install pdftohtml onto the 770 ??

it's installed by default :)

Re: How is PDF-Reading on the N770?
 

Have a 770 edition 2006. So far I'm unable to read an email PDF attachment. It constantly says "not enough memory". My card is a 512 SanDisk. How on earth can there be too little memory? The attachments (faxes) are between 30 - 70 kb.

Re: How is PDF-Reading on the N770?
 

Just voted. This will be an extremely useful feature to have.

Re: How is PDF-Reading on the N770?
 

I just downloaded 5 free e-books (in PDF) from Wowio.com

I got 5 Kurt Vonnegut books for free!

Only problem is, when I try to open a book with the native pdf reader, I get this message:

Unable to open. File format not supported.

On my PC the properties of the files say they Adobe Acrobat 7.0 documents.
I have opened another pdf file (not a book) that also says it's a Adobe Acrobat 7.0 document.

Any idea why I can't open these books?
Neil

Re: How is PDF-Reading on the N770?
 

I should add that I am using a 770 with latest 2006 OS

Re: How is PDF-Reading on the N770?
 

Faxes are generally scanned at 72 dpi - which yields a huge bitmap for a full page - but compress very well. So while they take up little space on disk or flash, the reader must creat a huge buffer in memory to hold the uncompressed fax picture. That is causing your out-of-memory issue.

In addition, PDF is horrible at handling image data - absolutely terrible resource consumption even on PCs. The format itself has bloated into a monster since the early days of postscript.

It's important to punish these terrible formats by not using them. Faxes are images. Convert them to .png with high compression. You will be able to view without problem using an image viewer.