

Images of technical PDFs on the Kindle DX - mdweezer
http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2009/06/12/technical-document-pdfs-on-the-kindle-dx/

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ghshephard
I've got a K1 and a K2 - neither of which are suitable for technical
references. We started playing with the DX at work today, reading Stephens
TCP/IP Volume II (Implementation) and some Network Diagram PDFs. It's _almost_
there. The PDFs of Network Diagrams took a little long to render (about 30
seconds) and weren't quite readable on the 6pt font. Stevens was pretty good,
and the page turning was reasonable. So close, but not 100% yet.

Amazon _finally_ nailed the page turning buttons - it's as good as I think it
will ever get. K1 basically required a wild finger ballet to avoid turning
pages - 75% of the time I ended up changing a page when picking it up anyways.
K2 went overboard, and required a painful push in an awkward spot on the
buttons to get the page to turn. The DX lets you pick up the device on the
left side (no buttons) without worrying about changing a page, and the right
side is just perfect. No accidental page turns, but not much effort to make it
happen. It's very natural - kudos. Optimized for right handed people (as all
books are, of course) \-- Edit (all english language books, that is)

I think the DX will open up a whole new audience, but we'll require at least
one more iteration before I abandon my technical bookshelf. We still need:

o A hair more resolution.

o Slightly faster page turns (though we're pretty close to where we need to
be)

o Most important - some mechanism/metaphor for random page seeks - Flipping
around a technical book is important, and there isn't a great way to do this
on the Kindle yet.

o I don't really care about color, but I recognize for some disciplines it's
an issue.

Still up in the air as to whether a tablet will manage to do this better than
the Kindle. As an aside - I tend to do 50% of my reading on the iPhone Kindle
App these days, saving my K1/K2 for the camping/beach/outside where they
perform better in bright light (and have a great battery advantage)

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stcredzero
The Kindle is still lacking the interactive zooming you can get on the iPhone.
Interactive multi-touch zoom & pan is very powerful. So much so that in some
contexts, it makes up for the inferior resolution, smaller size, and
backlighting of the LCD screen. For references with intricate diagrams, this
would be very useful. I find it makes for a great music "starter book." I just
import PDFs of my tunes, and I can zoom in to the first two measures for
normally readable notes of regular size.

Interactivity, period,is the key.

A screen technology fast enough to support a multi-touch coverflow, but with
print-like resolution and a reflective screen. That would be it.

I have great hopes for the Pixel Qi screen.

[http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/02/first-hands-on-with-
the...](http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/06/02/first-hands-on-with-the-pixel-qi-
lcde-paper-screen/)

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nirmal
I'd like to see some images of the Kindle DX rendering ACM papers.
Specifically the two-column format.

~~~
elq
excuse the poor lighting and crappy photo quality

<http://files.getdropbox.com/u/52575/photo.jpg>

It's quite readable. I've only seen one pdf that had any rendering glitches.

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bokonist
Does anybody know how well it renders books from Google books? For example:
[http://books.google.com/books/download/An_inquiry_into_the_n...](http://books.google.com/books/download/An_inquiry_into_the_nature_and_causes_of.pdf?id=CIlHAAAAIAAJ&output=pdf&sig=ACfU3U30Mr-
TZjwA0CMIhlOozdFHNXrO_g)

I've been holding off on an e-reader until one is good enough to display
scanned google books. E-Ink reader + Google Books = the Great Library of
Alexandria in my backpack. I can't wait.

~~~
elq
pages turn about 2x slower than in a pdf that's mostly text. but it's
readable.

~~~
bokonist
Thanks!

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zacharypinter
It'd be great if Evernote or Dropbox could partner with a device like the
Kindle.

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scorpioxy
Wow. That's actually not bad at all.

I own a Sony PRS-505 and its weaknesses are sort of shared with the K1 and
K2(minus the big amazon library). I hope that Sony is still planning on
competing in this space. I'd be interested to see what they would come up
with.

Having said that, I am very tempted in getting a DX.

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berntb
What I'd like to know is how easily you can browse (78 chars wide) code on a
Kindle DX? I'd like to replace print-to-read.

Make notes/small changes on the code? Sync contents with CVS?

(I could generate PDFs of the documentation, so that isn't a problem. Code is
harder to reformat for PDFs.)

Edit: Syntax

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rcoder
Plaintext is readable as-is, without any explicit conversion step. That being
said, if you really want a code review device, you might want to look at a
cheap laptop or tablet, for one basic reason: there's no direct text editing
available on the Kindle, and annotations are painful to write because of the
keyboard. The DX doesn't even have numbers on the main keymap, so you have to
use a symbol shift to type them.

~~~
berntb
Thanks, but I read code mostly on paper today. My idea was to replace that.

