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Ask Slashdot: Tablets For Papers; Are We There Yet?
An anonymous reader writes "When I was younger, engineering and science offices didn't have computers yet. It was the tradition: Piled Higher and Deeper desks, and overloaded bookcases. I ended up doing other things, and haven't been in a regular office for a couple of decades. Now I'm older, spending a lot more time with the screen, and finding my aging butt and back aren't as pliable for the long hours of reading papers. And while looking at rather expensive chairs, etc for a solution, what I'm remembering is we used to be able to lean back, feet up, while reading the stapled print-outs — makes a change from hunched-over writing and typing. So I'm what wondering is this: Are We There Yet with tablets? You guys would know — What makes a good tablet for reading, sorting, annotating, and searching PDFs, etc? Hardware and software — what tablets have gotten this really right?"
Works well for me. I just stuff PDFs into my dropbox folder on my desktop, and read em on the iPad. Makes for a happy combination. There is also an Android tablet in the house, works about as well. Seems like a solved problem from my perspective. I never print anything for reading any more...
My wife is finishing up her PhD in a biological science field. A couple years ago she was carrying like 70+ printed out papers around with her so she could reference them when writing at home or at a coffee shop. She got an original iPad and started using GoodReader and said it changed the game completely for her. She's on an iPad 3 now but the effect is the same.
I got her old iPad when she upgraded and I loaded literally a couple thousand papers and other documents I've saved over the years (mostly IEEE and ACM papers and a ton of standards documents I reference for work), luckily all already organized. GoodReader will let you load things and keep whatever directory/folder organization you have. It's great!
Much as I love my Kindle, it's not quite there for PDFs. While great for text (e.g. novels), it can't reflow a PDF well (or at all?), and the screen size makes it too small to reasonably view most PDFs at full size. A Kindle DX might be better, but still not ideal. Obviously color will be a no-go.
I would recommend an iPad or something similar for technical documents and most other PDFs. Goodreader + Dropbox is a great combination.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
My company makes software for allied health professionals, and a large number of our customers are chiropractors. They are starting to use tablets quite extensively for recording their medical notes, so I am perfectly positioned to offer a slightly tangential response. Full disclosure: I am not a chiropractor - I've just worked with thousands of them, so I know a bit about spines and posture.
Subby, you mentioned that your back isn't what it used to be. This is an important factor.
During our lab trials of tablets, we received a lot of feedback about the ergonomics of tablets - and one tester actually had to be excused from testing after a measly 15 minutes due to neck pain developing. Here's the problem:
- A tablet has a very small screen. Don't let anybody trick you into thinking that a 10.1" screen is big. Its not. You have to hold the tablet quite close to your face to be able to read it comfortably.
- Even the lightest tablets still have significant weight. You can safely anticipate that your tablet will weigh about a kilogram.
- When you hold a kilogram weight up in front of your face, it distorts your body's centre of balance. In order to compensate, your body transfers weight either resulting in you leaning backwards, or sticking your backside out. Either of these are posturally abnormal positions. For the first 5 minutes, no problems - but for extended periods, this can (and likely will) result in back pain, neck pain and headaches. Over weeks and months, it will damage your spine.
- The alternative is to sit in a relaxed position and hold the device in your lap. Sounds good until you realise that your entire body is falling into a C shape (when seen from the side). This is also an abnormal position for the spine - and creates the same problems. We see a lot of x-rays of children who spent excessive time with the iPod/PST/handheld device in their lap - their spine is worse than that of a 40 year old.
In the end, we published an official white paper advising our customers that A) tablets work fine; the technology is sound and reasonably mature; B) we DO NOT recommend that they use them.
It's astounding how many use Goodreader or iAnnotate on iPad when there is an absolutely fantastic paper management app available in the form of "Papers", made by Mekentosj. It has a Desktop (Mac + PC) counterpart so you can sync, it has all the major search engines built in, supports your university's proxy, has annotation features and what not. I love the thing! (I am not affiliated with that company in any way)
this sig is useless
The newer iPads have the resolution and speed to do PDFs justice; but capacitive touchscreens aren't exactly god's gift to stylus-based annotation. Yeah, they sell capacitive styluses; but it isn't exactly a Wacom...
The Samsung Note tablets are not just capacitive. They can distinguish between your fingers and the pen. It's not even modal. In other words, if you're reading something, you can just use your finger(s) to flip the pages and the pen to highlight what you want. The tablet even knows when you're just hovering your pen over it, or whether you're actually touching the screen with it. It's quite amazing.
My only recommendation is that you if you get such a tablet, you get the latest version of the Note -- not the original Note. Samsung did a much better job integrating this technology in their latest version.
Autodesk do a handy app sketchbook express, its a sketch pad
I note you are using Android, so my suggestion may not be worthwhile, but I am using PenUltimate for all my hand-written notes, and, for that simple task, it does an excellent job. No OCR, but, frankly, I'm not sure how much processing power you'd need to throw at my handwriting...
One more issue some pdf files are locked and cannot be edited or annotated. Some software will ignore this and let you annotate others will not.
I may be able to help you here, if you have access to a Linux machine (heck, it may work natively on Android; I don't know): use ghostscript to assist in removing the lock. I have this as unlock_pdf.sh:
#! /bin/bash
# takes specified file and prints output using ghostscript
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f $1
Just save the file in question to your machine, and run sh unlock_pdf.sh pdfname.pdf and wait for output.pdf to be generated.
There may be better ways of doing this, but this has worked pretty well for me over the last couple of years, so I hope it offers some assistance.