IMO, Reading two-column papers on an iPhone (through PDF) is a real pain -- IMO the format relies on you using your eyes to jump from bottom left to top right, rather than having to scroll from the very bottom to the very top (diagonally). Same problem even exists for single-column styles -- you need to zoom in so much that you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically.
The need to scroll doesn't exist on a large screen or on a piece of A4, but on smaller devices like mobile phones or even tablets, it's annoying. Having a responsive page means you can scroll vertically as you read, rather than having to make a big jumps (or constant horizontal scrolls) that can really break the flow.
I wonder if that's a personal thing? Over the past year, I've been trying to join the mobile revolution - sort of. The majority of my browsing is now done on a tablet.
I read quite a few PDFs and don't actually have any complaints. I am not personally seeing any readability issues and don't mind consuming PDFs at all.
That said, I think I now understand your complaint. Thanks! I just don't personally have any trouble with it. I use multiple tablets, of varied sizes, and I've had good experiences with all of the devices. While some PDFs are horribly formatted, I find that the device choice doesn't help that and it's a design choice from the author.
> The majority of my browsing is now done on a tablet.
Reading PDFs on a tablet isn't too bad because of large screen real estate.
Reading PDFs on a small mobile phone requires me to zoom in to make the font big enough for me to read, and then I have to scroll right to read, and left and down to move to a new section of the column.
Try reading a PDF on a smaller device than a tablet. I'm sure you'll be able to see what we mean.
The need to scroll doesn't exist on a large screen or on a piece of A4, but on smaller devices like mobile phones or even tablets, it's annoying. Having a responsive page means you can scroll vertically as you read, rather than having to make a big jumps (or constant horizontal scrolls) that can really break the flow.