At first, I was surprised. Then I wasn’t fan at all. Now, after transfering the doc pdfs to my tablet, I’m totally in love with the landscape format and I wanted to let you know about it! That’s a great move. Thanks a lot!
I presume you are on an Android-based tablet? I ask because we are going to look into ways of providing the docs in a more native format than PDF for those.
I just changed the ibook extension to epub and used those. As long as DRM isn’t enabled on an ibook document it is only an enhanced epub.
Yep. Android 4.0 and I’m using Acrobat Reader.
Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing that. Thanks for the tip, Robert!
I need to clarify one point above. The ibooks format has css incompatibilities with epub which caused some formatting issues in places but overall was still quite useable on my old cruz tablet.
Well, we will give it a try and see how usable it is overall.
Looking at the pdf-files:
I think the landscape format turns these manuals unusable if you use only one monitor. Up to now i have set the IDE on the right 2/3 of the screen and the language reference on the left 1/3 part. That way it’s easy to look up things while you are programming. The use of the landscape format is preventing to put the LR next to the IDE, that’s not very handy.
Further the size of the pictures is sometimes so small that it’s not adding any information to the subject it should illustrate. I have copied some of those small pictures outof the pdf and looked at them in a pictureviewer (Irfanview), then it’s clear that the pictures self are often large enough but are scaled down in the pdf.
Also this format allows 2 columns per page which is causing the start of a new subject is constantly hopping from left to right and back again. This makes searches more difficult.
If there is a subject with much explanatory text, the text flows to next pages without headings, therefor you have to look back everytime.
I hope these comments are helpful.