Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Kindle 3 and Adjusting Contrast on PDFs - examples

The Kindle 3:  PDF ADJUSTMENTS FOR SCREEN CONTRAST - EXAMPLES


PDF page as-is


PDF adjustment to "darker"



PDF adjustment to "darkest"


Rotated to Landscape mode


Click on images to see the larger, original ones.
  These are screen captures from the Kindle 3, rather than photos, and the adjustments have a larger effect with the 16 shades of gray of the actual screen.

The image on the left shows all the options available with the 'Aa' Text-key (on the bottom row of the keyboard).  Rotation on the Kindle 3 is not automatically done, so you have to choose the orientation from the pop-up

As you can see, several of the regular options for books are not available when working with PDFs.  The INactive ones are: Typeface, Line Spacing, Words per Line, and Text to Speech.

Other options for PDFS that are new to the Kindle 3:
Place Cursor in Page. Press up or down on the 5-way controller to display the cursor.
  — displays a blinking cursor on the page.  Use this option when you are zoomed in to a PDF page and you want to create a note or highlight, or use the dictionary lookup.
"

We were not able to access the words in a PDF before, to highlight passages or make notes.  Highlighted passages can now be made and also forwarded to Facebook and Twitter, if social networking is enabled where you are.  The zoom feature was added to earlier Kindles via software update v2.5.x.

These examples were requested some time ago.  Let me know if there are newer features you'd like shown.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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4 comments:

  1. whats was the point. I mean most kindle 3 owner already know this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, you're certainly fast on the draw, Anonymous.

    Did you take a poll ? Actually, browsing the Kindle forums, many don't know things like this because people don't experiment that much and the user guide is not in printed form and many don't hunt it down or read it when it's finally downloaded to their Kindles.

    Also, this type of question is asked by people who don't know what a feature is like before they decide to get one and so they ask about it.

    Sorry to ruin your morning.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Does amazon have any intention to supplement any of these new features to kindle 2. It seems that the software version of my Kindle DX is gonna be 2.5.3 forever.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous at 8:54 PM PST,
    I have no way of knowing, but the Pearl screen is known to be faster and capable of more contrast so it could be that similar changes for contrast adjustment would be due eventually for the DX Graphite that uses the Pearl screen.

    As for annotations and anything accessing the PDFs to highlight passages or make notes on a section, you'd think that could be done but I imagine they introduce these features on the newer models first, get them out, and then work on changing the programming for the older models later, after differentiating the new models from the old in that way.

    I do remember that the Kindle 2 got its native PDF support LONG after the DX got it, but it eventually was given it.

    Let's hope something happens soon. The biggest strangeness for me is not updating the *EXPENSIVE* DXG to do what the little K3 can do with the same screen technology.

    But those don't have the WiFi capability built in, and some speculate they might be working on that for a newer edition as DX's were to arrive in stores in November for the holidays but time is getting really short.

    All this is total speculation only.

    ReplyDelete

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