Off-topic > Off-off-topic

What do you use for reading ShadowRun pdf files? Do you like it?

(1/3) > >>

Beta:
What is your preferred device for reading ShadowRun PDFs on?  (yes, many of us prefer the physical books, but with pdfs being half the price and available months sooner, sometimes I’m going to buy the pdf.)

Background:
Up until now I’ve just been reading them on my laptop at home – except really I’ve just been skimming, or jumping to parts that I’m looking for, because I find reading full page pdf layout on a laptop screen to be a fairly horrible experience.  Always having to move the page around, I find it rough on the eyes, and really easy to lose track of exactly where I was reading.  (I also have the same issues with long electronic documents at work, so finding a solution that works for SR pdfs might also be handy in some other applications)

I looked into the possibility of reading them on an e-reader (Kindle, Nook, or Kobo), which have an appealing price point, would let me order a bunch of other books that are only coming out electronically, are ‘close’ to paper as a reading experience, and can easily be read anywhere.  But those are all basically formatted for paperback sized pages, and from what I understand they deal poorly with large pages and with much non-text formatting (how does a black and white e-ink screen deal with those ugly read text boxes?).  There does seem to be a reader called Onyx with a somewhat larger page (but still well short of full page size), but those seem to have some issues and are quite expensive.

Which leaves, as far as I can see:
-    full sized computer monitors (not generally where I want to curl up and read for an hour),
-   A tablet.  I don’t have a tablet currently, I guess there would be the question of screen size, screen quality, whether it has some mode to reduce the blue-light glare that fatigues the eyes … not sure what would be good here
-   Or possibly one of the laptops that can convert to tablet mode (screen folds flat back), and look into rotating the document on the screen so the proportions match better.

Obviously spending big bucks on a device to save a few bucks by getting the books in pdf format doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

It eventually occurred to me to see what devices (and or software/applications) others use for reading ShadowRun pdfs, and how much they liked or disliked them.  Thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions!

Kincaid:
I have my entire Shadowrun library on an Amazon Fire that I bought especially for that purpose.  I've been pretty happy with it--I won't say the Fire has the most amazing display out there, but it was a very low price point and it's functional enough for my limited needs.

Beta:

--- Quote from: Kincaid on ---I have my entire Shadowrun library on an Amazon Fire that I bought especially for that purpose.  I've been pretty happy with it--I won't say the Fire has the most amazing display out there, but it was a very low price point and it's functional enough for my limited needs.

--- End quote ---

Interesting -- do you shrink the pages to the screen size and find them readable?  Or do you have to move around to read it all?  And does it read them OK natively, or are you running them through some other software first to make them more manageable?

ETA: and what screen size of Fire do you have?  Looking at the Amazon Fire page, it would appear that they come in 7", 8", and 10.1" screen sizes.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Fire-7-Inch-Tablet-8GB/dp/B00TSUGXKE

PMárk:
I'm reading them (and most of my books for a while, including all rpg books, because of price and accessibility in Hungary) on my Kindle (next-to last gen model). It handles pdfs fairly well and it's easy on the eye. Yes, you have to move over the page (since you'll have to zoom in), but, with the never models' touch screen, it's not a big deal. It tends to struggle with pdfs which have many elaborate layers (picture+background+border+...) as it loads pages slower and some pages, usually the full-page picture ones not at all, but it's really mostly about layers, not pictures in my experience. In the case of SR books, it had problems with the pages with only the red boxes on them, but somehow not the ones with boxes and plain text too. That means 3-4 pages from the corebook it can't show and that's all.

 Aside from the above, it works fine 99% of the time and I'm happy with it. Of course it's not the best device for in-game referencing, but for first, cover-to-cover reading and for reading fluff, it's a good substitute of physical copies for me. I might add that due to the light gray background of 5e books, it's a bit darker than books from earlier editions (and my kindle isn't a paperwhite), but still fine/okay depending on the ambient light (and you could change page lightness).

So, it's not the best, but it works and you'd have a great device for reading novels too and for a bargain price.

The Tekwych:
I use iBooks on an iPad. There are times when I zoom in that I get black boxes instead of text but that happens with pdfs from many companies. I would buy every book again if they were published in ePub

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page