Mis establos!!!

None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained). Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

I work on the EPSRC-funded @CHI_MED project; all views are my own. I used to work at Diabetes UK (until 22 June 2012) as a Science Information Officer (effectively a science-specialist librarian but not quite a clinical librarian). Before that it was ScienceLine and back in the mists of time it was lipid chemistry & neuroscience.

Contact: @JoBrodie or reconfigure this email address me.meeeee @ gmail.com (replace me and meeeee with obvious letters, eg... jo.brodie@ etc).

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

I wish PDFs had a 'make single column' button...

...to save scrolling down one side of the page, scrolling up again and then scrolling back down the other side. Sometimes I do copy and paste the text into something else and sort that out myself but maybe Adobe could put this in one of their many, many, many updates.

Here's what I have (click to enlarge)



Here's what I want

I made this myself in Paint on my PC but I can't keep doing that ;)

The paper shown is Blandford, A., Cauchi, A., Curzon, P., Eslambolchilar, P., Furniss, D., Gimblett, A., Huang, H., Lee, P., Li, Y., Masci, P., Oladimeji, P., Rajkomar, A., Rukšėnas, R., & Thimbleby, H. (2011). Comparing actual practice and user manuals: A case study based on programmable infusion pumps. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems for Medicine and Health Care (EICS4Med), 59–64.
Posted by Jo at 12:16
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1 comment:

  1. Despite the non-stream-based vagaries of the PDF format, this would actually be pretty easy to implement if the user can tell it how many columns there are.

    The PDF reader would then render each page twice, but set the rendering viewport to cover the left half or right half of the page alternately.

    For three-column text, it renders 3 times with left, middle, right. For four columns... well, you get the idea.

    FOSS developers - here's a chance to get ahead of Adobe.

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