Terrible reading experience...

[Guest]

I downloaded the AIR app on my Macintosh to read monographs made available by my university library.

The resulting pages are one-third-filled with a single page-wide column of tiny text — text that occasionally overlaps with itself. So far as I can determine, the text cannot be reflowed into a more readable format/larger size. This makes printing untenable: the text size is too small *for me,* and I use no vision correction, in the resulting document. It is too small to read un-zoomed on a 22-inch display. God help the laptop set. The footnotes are not only not hyperlinked, but the UI makes it very difficult to move back and forth between the main text and end-notes. Even advancing a page at a time cannot reliably center on the third of the page that has any text on it. In short, this is totally unusable.

I'm not sure if this is Adobe's fault or the fault of whoever authored the eBook, but it sure as hell isn't working for me. Is there anything I can do?

[Frustrated in AZ]

Sorry, but this forum deals with questions concerning Adobe Digital

Editions, not AIR. I'm not sure anyone here can help you

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[Guest]

Ahh, thanks Frustrated. It was indeed the Digital Editions app that I downloaded, which is written using Adobe's AIR platform: essentially, it's a Flash app running outside a browser. When I referred to it as an AIR app, I meant the Macintosh edition of ADE.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

[Frustrated in AZ]

Resizing text is a function of the way the monograph text is encoded. The

ereader capability (or ADE) won't be able to reformat the lines to fit

screen size if the text isn't encoded properly. I'd go back to your

source's technical support function and see if they can change something.

Or, check the download source and see if they have other 'formats'

available.

Hope this helps!

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[Guest]

I see. Well, then, I guess I need to take this up with the library.

[Jim_Lester-oIBbX7]

Is it a PDF file or an EPUB file. 

If it is a PDF file there are controls for zooming (and then panning) on the subsequent page, but PDF is fundamentally a 'fixed' format so you can't just increase the font size and have it relayout like a web page would.

For EPUB files there are two button in the the reading view to increase and decrease the font size, like you can get in a browser. However like browsers bad formatting can limit the ability to resize the text (specifying font sizes in px instead of in ems, for instance).

p.s.  BTW - ADE is most definitely not an AIR application.  Although it does have it's own built in flash engine - it is not built on top of the AIR runtime.

[Guest]

Thanks Jim_Lester.

The file I downloaded from the library catalog was a .acsm file. It seems, poking around, that the book file is a PDF, which certainly explains why I couldn't reflow the text. There wasn't any especially obvious way to find that out — e.g. greyed out controls for resizing and reflowing text, that would make clear that those options weren't available with this document.

As for AIR, I guess I was fooled by the total lack of standard system menus, scrollbars, controls, etc.: there's no "Select all...", no "Find Again...", no Application Preferences... It isn't really a Macintosh application at all.

Well, this is one of those situations where other people — at the library, at the press — have made choices that I just have to live with.