An unintuitive secret of reading books on computers: reading PDFs with original typesetting is much better than reading ebooks, which treat text like a 4chan shitposter and have impoverished reading software.
But… where to get the PDFs?! A survey & suggestions for future work:
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This is such a fascinating point for me, as often my goal is to get a PDF into something that can flow so that I can actually read it on a smaller device. PDFs are so static, and they also don't work well with text-to-speech systems.
I guess it depends on what sort of reading...
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Right, I guess! I don't read on smaller devices. I use a reMarkable when away from my computer to read in the original page layout.
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Makes sense. Haven't splurged in it yet.
My hope is that very soon we will get actually good tools to transition a PDF from flow mode to normal mode (using "AI").
Ideally in combination with voice assistants that "highlight the previous sentence" while I'm listening to a paper.
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This app does a pretty good job with intelligent PDF reflow: apps.apple.com/us/app/pdf-ref
’s iOS apps PDF Expert and Documents both have an amazing Reader Mode:
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Android :/ (it has other perks!).
This took me down a rabbit hole which shows that Adobe actually does recent reflow now in their app.
However, no text-to-speech. Still looking for the combination... (ideally would be in Books, to sync with other things but no luck)