|
I've captured quite a bit of attention with my first nook eBook Reader and PDF Documents article. With my creative use of metadata and article title, I've captured more than just my normal VERY casual virtualization audience. I have actually received a few follow-up questions that I can address with a second review, which digs a bit deeper into bookmarks and scanned OCR documents. The first request that came across was around bookmarks and highlighting and taking notes. When it comes to the PDF functionality of the nook, there are several notable missing features. First the "Highlights and notes" option is simply missing in action. Granted, I have yet to use this feature in a standard eBook, but with technical documentation or research PDFs, I see this almost as a vital option. Also noted as missing, is the "Look up word" feature. Next, I wanted to dig deeper into the bookmark capabilities. In a regular eBook, the bookmarks are stored in the nook as their Chapter and page number. I'm currently re-reading Stephen King's The Stand, which unfortunately doesn't seem to have proper chapter marks so the whole book is one single (and super long) chapter simply called "Cover". For this book, my current bookmark is called "Cover: p. 165". Easy to understand if the eBook was properly rendered. In my PDF, I get nothing even close to as friendly. My book is properly rendered for chapters as a part of the PDF I constructed. I can select any particular chapter from the "Go To" option in the menu. The major problem is that when I add a bookmark, it uses some fancy PDF markup, which makes absolutely no sense. In my case, I bookmarked a page describing VirtualCenter licensing on page 100. When I went to return to this bookmark, the nook instead threw out "5,#pdfloc(2506,99) at me. TECHNICALLY, my PDF page numbering seems to be off by 1. Page 99 of the PDF is displayed as Page 100 in the nook. It still doesn't explain what the heck the first portion of information is that it is throwing at me. The final question thrown at me was around scanned OCR PDF documents. In the case and samples provided to me, it appears to be college research. I was presented with 2 documents of similar quality, one that was just a seemingly normal 1 column PDF with no highlighting. The second document was 2 columns and had Acrobat highlighting and annotations embedded in the document. The standard single column document rendered extremely well, as can be seen in the sample photos below. Paragraph breaks were properly aligned and the only weirdness I ran into was when one PDF page ended in the middle of a sentence, the nook would show that as cut off on half a page and continued on the next full page. Not a big deal and still quite readable.  
Where the wheels fell off the bus is when I tried to view the 2-Column PDF that had highlights and annotations. I do not know if it was the highlighting at annotations, or if it was the multi-column rendering of the nook, but it was largely unreadable. On some pages, the document scaled down to fit both columns onto a single page, and on others, the nook properly rendered multiple pages and scaled a readable version for a few pages before flipping back to a scaled multi-column view. On the scaled pages, there was also an instance of random shadowing behind some of the text, which made it literally unusable. In the first image below, you see the situation where the document scaled onto the page. The second instance is zoomed in to see the shadow text. I had to use a slow shutter speed to low light, but you should be able to see the difference between my horrible camera hand and the text shadowing.  
As a last-ditch effort, I decided to try to use the highly touted Calibre to convert the documents from PDF to ePub. By converting the PDF's to ePub, I again gained access to the "Highlights and Notes" and "Look up word" features within the documents. The problem was the formatting was garbage. There were random paragraph breaks that would split paragraphs mid-sentence and all kinds of page break issues. Calibre also had NO idea what to do with the multi-column OCR document and simply turned the document into a 3-Page document, which was the text leading up to the first multi-column page. I admittedly need to dig deeper into Calibre before stating the program was to blame, but I was better off from a readability standpoint letting the nook internally convert the PDF documents, albeit with missing features. Again, Jeff hasn't stepped up and offered me a Kindle just yet, so can't really do any comparisons against what the Kindle can do with PDFs with its latest updates. Anyone willing to test, I'm more than willing to share source documents to get a good subjective review of both devices. |
