questions from a newbie

[bugsbunny14]

hello all ,

i have some questions concerning the sony reader

1- will i be able to drop the .pdf and .txt i have and play it or do i have to convert it first ?

2- will .pdf files take more time to load on the sony reader than other formats and if it contains pictures will it take even longer time to load ?

3- if i have a .pdf files in other languages such as arabic will it be readable ?

thanks

[NatCh]

Welcome to the forum, bugsbunny14!

Let's see:

1) Yes, it reads TXT, PDF and RTF files without conversion.

2) That one we don't know about yet, I assume that the larger the file the slower it will load, but how long that will take ....

3) If it's a PDF file, I'd assume that it doesn't matter what lanquage it's in, the fonts sould be embedded, so it should work fine.

For PDF's in general, you'll of course get best results if the file is formatted for the size of the Reader's screen.

You may find the Sony Q&A thread useful.

[Ken Stuart]

Originally Posted by bugsbunny14

2- will .pdf files take more time to load on the sony reader than other formats and if it contains pictures will it take even longer time to load ?

I'll go out on a limb here and state that pdf files will always take longer to load than any other format on any device at any point in the future.

[lordvetinari2]

Originally Posted by NatCh

3) If it's a PDF file, I'd assume that it doesn't matter what lanquage it's in, the fonts sould be embedded, so it should work fine.

Not exactly. It depends what you're printing with, and what you are reading with. For instance, if I try to read PDF files with Asian characters in them with Foxit Reader, it will ask me to donwnload the Asian pack language file or those characters will appear corrupted.

When generating a PDF file from Adobe Acrobat you can choose to embed fonts or not. If you do not embed fonts into a PDF and the reader used does not have access to those fonts, they will appear corrupted.

Some PDF printing programs have more options than others. For instance, PDF Creator has A LOT of options (see attached snapshot). I think my boss, who's supposed to know about these kind of things (he gives lectures on PDF and DTP), once said that the virtual printer from OpenOffice 2 did not embed the fonts, but he wasn't really paying attention, with all the ordering about and all

Originally Posted by bugsbunny14

2- will .pdf files take more time to load on the sony reader than other formats and if it contains pictures will it take even longer time to load?

Just like the difference in loading times in a computer.
It depends what the PDF has inside. If it's only text, it will be pretty fast. If it has a solid image on each page, it will be kind of fast (think JPG). If it has "vectorized" images (simple and individualized images you can zoom and don't really loose much quality), then it will be VERY slow. These kinds of PDFs are normally for printing, not for viewing on-screen, but sometimes they appear on the Internet. When loading them on your computer, if you notice that images appear to pop up here and there before shaping the actual page, tough luck!

PS: Just in case, I am restraining myself from saying "PC". However, since OS X and Intel chipsets I don't think there is really much of a difference between Macs and PCs. AFAIK a Mac has always been a "Personal Computer", but I think the "PC" has been more usually understood as "IBM PC".

[bugsbunny14]

thanks natch for your reply