#3210 NORM Untriag: Consider standardizing on HTML rather than PDF and scanned pages

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#3210: Consider standardizing on HTML rather than PDF and scanned pages
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 Reporter:  ssb22   |       Owner:  jg       
     Type:  defect  |      Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal  |   Milestone:  Untriaged
Component:  distro  |     Version:           
 Keywords:          |    Verified:  0        
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 It is very difficult to change the
 print size in PDF files at viewing
 time.  The Read activity offers no
 way to do this, and simply
 magnifying the screen will not do
 as it will require too much
 horizontal panning which is
 tedious.

 It can be useful to generate PDF
 files tailored to the needs of a
 specific individual by running TeX
 or similar; see for example
 http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/ssb22/notes/
 which includes notes on how to scan
 a text and produce a giant-print
 pdf which is reflowed to any
 given screen size without using any
 OCR.  This can be useful for
 helping people with low vision to
 give presentations etc (provided
 that the PDF viewer can turn the
 pages quickly enough, using
 double-buffering if necessary,
 because the amount of text on each
 page is very limited when doing it
 this way).  However I'm not sure if
 this is really suitable for the XO
 unless the circumstances are
 exceptional, because it involves
 rather a lot of processing and disk
 space.

 HTML on the other hand can be  enlarged and reflowed in a more
 lightweight way, for example by
 using a complex user-supplied CSS
 file such as one of the files at
 http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/ssb22/css/.

 Note however that those CSS files
 make no attempt to enlarge the
 images, because this is not
 normally needed for Web browsing
 but it might be needed for
 books.  It should be possible
 to sort this out with a
 Greasemonkey script if necessary
 though, provided that the images
 are broken down into logical units
 as much as possible (i.e. they are
 not already as large as the screen)
 (those picture books that were
 scanned a page at a time would be awkward).

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Ticket URL: <https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3210>
One Laptop Per Child <http://laptop.org/>