Two Column Papers on a Kindle Paperwhite
Abhijit, 19 February 2024
Reading double column IEEE formatted PDFs on a 7-inch Kindle White is not a good experience. Far from it, in fact. The situation is not much better with any of the other major journals either. I have long felt that if only journals were allowed to charge a reasonable profit margin they might be able to support publishing in multiple modern formats - single column for Kindle style devices, text and image side by side for wide monitors, lightweight HTML for browsers, and much more.
For now my intention is to somehow improve the experience of reading double column papers on a Kindle. I was looking for ways to get PDFtk to hack and jigsaw parts of a PDF but lo and behold, someone has already done it!
The tool is called K2 PDF Opt and it is just a simple download, change execute permissions and run! The results are actually fantastic - even the titles are processed properly.
It is just SO beautiful!