Zooming and Margins

Question

I recently bought the Sony PRS-950, mainly to use for reading and annotating academic papers, most of which come as PDFs, generated or scanned. So far, I've been very happy about it displays PDFs --- even on scanned PDFs, pages turn very quickly --- and the touch and stylus input are very convenient, but I've run into several issues:
1) The "Margin Cut" display mode does not cut nearly as much as it should. It's hard to quantify, but even on PDFs that were not scanned (and thus have no noise to confuse the detection), it never seems to reduce the margin even by half.
2) Many PDFs are not amenable to being reflowed, but, the way PRS-950 is shaped, should be very readable (at original text size or bigger) in Landscape mode. However, in the Landscape mode, the maximum zoom level the slider allows is too small, and I can't magnify the text to use the reader's full height (i.e. width when turned sideways). In fact, even at maximum zoom, the gray "empty space" beyond the edges of the sheet shows.
3) The annotation feature works very well, but it's a little annoying that magnification has to be turned off when annotating. I can understand why that needs to be done when the text had been reflowed (i.e. is shown in size other than S), but while I wouldn't presume to know how hard it would be to program, can't the pen input be "mapped" back to the original coordinates for simple zoom?
4) A minor UI annoyance I've noticed is that when the Options button menu appears, the Orientation button is always at the bottom, which means that to reach it in Landscape mode takes several taps, even though it's one of the most frequently used choices.
I think that this is a good device, and I will probably keep it, but in light of these issues, I would hesitate recommending it to others, especially if they don't have my relatively young eyes. Are there workarounds known for any of these? Is it likely that they might be resolved in firmware upgrades in the near future?

Answer 1

> For the margin cut, try this.
>
> In Zoom-in mode, tap the column twice. It magically removes all margins.
Thank you for the workaround. It looks like it even works in the two-column mode, although not for scanned documents, which is understandable. I've also found this workaround for overcoming the maximum zoom in Landscape mode: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showth ... p?t=111786 , and they seem to work together, so that ameliorates the problem somewhat.
However, when in the zoom-lock mode, paging through the document is very tedious: pressing or gesturing to continue reading makes the reader show the same area on the next page, rather than scrolling down, so in order to page through the document, I have to:
1) Press (Zoom) Unlock.
2) On the manual zoom screen, scroll down.
3) Press Lock.
and that's if I am still on the same page. If I am on the bottom of the page, I have to:
1) Press the Next button (or gesture to turn the page).
2) Press (Zoom) Unlock.
3) On the manual zoom screen, scroll up several times.
4) Press Lock.
Ideally, the behavior should be something like this:
1) In "Margin Cut" and "Original" Page Modes, the maximum zoom level in the Landscape mode should be at least enough that on a Letter-sized document with 1.25 inch margins (i.e. a 6 inch text column), the text should occupy the entire height (width in Landscape mode) of the device. This would let it be displayed in the size it would have had on paper. (A slightly higher maximum zoom level to display it slightly magnified would be nice.)
2) In the zoom-lock mode, pressing or gesturing "Next" should scroll straight down and only go to the next page if the bottom of the page has been reached. (It would be nice to have it handle two-column and three-column scrolling as well.) This is particularly important for scanned documents. (A lot of old scientific papers are only available in that form.)
Are we likely to see such a fix in a firmware update?