What is a good application for reading PDF's on phone? I want a PDF viewer that makes it possible to change font-size. The text in my PDF's are really text - not an image. I can select the contents with Samsung Notes for example. If a reader is a able to select it, there must be a reader that changes the font-size right?

I'm reading "Beautiful code" at the moment. It's a great book

All is great and good in PDFs until you realize that each line of text is absolutely positioned... If you were to increase the font size, you would need to increase the distance between those lines as well as to wrap line contents just so they fit the screen. And by that point all line breaks act stupid, text doesn't read as whole. Unfortunately, PostScript kinda documents are not layout-agnostic and have very specific dimensions. Web is just more superior when you want a flexible book... but barely anybody publishes a book in HTML.

To address your issue: maybe a screen reader application is needed? It could glance over line breaks and concatenate them into a single text piece each time?

@vintprox what is a screen reader you recommend?

Maybe i should find a converter from pdf to epub. Epub has decent readers AFAIK. I had a kobo but it died without honor

@retoor Haha, shot and miss... on the subject of person who could recommend you a screenreader. I don't use one.

It was more of an example of how PDF text lines can be transferred into your brain, but there are other ways that I'm probably missing.

I like epub files cuz they're smaller (I sync a lot of books to my phone) and I use ReadEra

might work with PDFs as well idk
I think it has a reflow mode?

If ebook readers like Kindle can do it, I don't see why a computer wouldnt

I remember using some "text mode" in ReadEra that would do what you want. But I can't find it now. Maybe it was just for epub and not for pdf? I don't know.

@jestdotty will try

@Hazarth well, my kobo ereader also didn't change pdf font sizes.

@cafecortado yh, epub is the bomb, maybe I need a convertor but I switch books a lot, so to convert all the time.. Such uncomfortable

PDFs are WYSIWYG so you can't do that.

.epub is just html, so you extract the text and just apply css to it like any website or whatever and can change the font size and whatever else. I tried to write a epub reader once but it was too much work so I haitus'ed it (I wanted to make text to speech that wasn't retarded but I couldn't get it to detect a text to speech engine on Linux and that's where I was testing things)

ReadEra has "reflow" mode for PDFs, but it won't work for all PDFs. most PDFs have text in them, but sometimes you get PDFs which are a collection of scanned images of a real book. you can't text to speech those nor can you reflow them (reflow meaning the app will extract the text and make the font bigger and whatever else), furthermore those PDFs are then 150-200mb, so chances are unless it's something esoteric you won't run into them

still, 500kb-2mb for a epub is better than the 5-20-50 MB for a text pdf

@retoor congrats!

@jestdotty You know what? Once you mentioned a "reflow" of the scanned pages, I've remembered a project from the decade old employment. It involved making scanned book actually readable and even transferring some graphics. Our lead had an orgasm from the thought of making notes on pages, so I had to implement those as well. All in a form of SPA that works on desktop. It was a time for me to learn Node.js and Electron.

I recall finding a lib that would help me convert an OCR reading to a normal text. Was a hell o' work, but most of the pages were converted nicely. But there were things that we had to correct by hand, like Yakut glyphs, spaces and conversion errors. Shame that I can't really remember if I was at the root of this or my colleague was, but I clearly was on the correction and web duty.

@vintprox oh yeah

a bunch of books I read look like they were passed through that... because there's typos that don't make any sense. it's like something tried to guess the shape of the letter on paper and got it wrong, sometimes there's even an autocorrect on it and that seems worse. I can correct for a letter but when the word is wrong it upsets me because I think that one word must've meant something tremendously valuable but it was probably just innocuous lol

@cafecortado thanks, I had to whore a lot for it. Thank God I have much experience in that