Report To The Stakeholders

[Celti]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Or could it be less that twenty-somethings are more fond of technology, and more that they have better eyesight?

I sincerely doubt it, given I have such a myopic prescription that has even high-index ultra-thin-and-light polycarbonate lenses falling off my face because the lenses are so unbalanced. I feel quite certain, given the example of my 60-year-old mother who also prefers PDFs (well, she actually plays AD&D 2e and has the old-school WinHelp files containing the entire rules compendium from the Core Rules program they shipped ages ago), that when I'm that age I'll interact with my phone or tablet or laptop much the same as I do now, just with a different pair of glasses.

Originally Posted by Þorkell

[...]but if I'm comparing something on page 5 to something on page 20 I find that paper is much better (or I go halfway and print out one of the pages and look at the other on screen).

In SumatraPDF, I'd, say, be on page 20. It sends me back to page 5 for a cross-reference so I press 'g', type '5', and hit Enter, which takes me to page 5. I then use Alt-Right and Alt-Left to bounce back and forth between page 5 and page 20, comparing as I need to — and since I can arrange the point of scroll to be exactly the same point on the screen, I don't even have to move my eyes to compare them as I swap hither and yon, which I find makes for fewer errors and less time spent re-locating text to compare.

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

I find my latop, even with a 16.4 inch 1920 x 1080 screen, even worse for viewing PDFs than my iPad. Documents are a vertical portrait display experience, but modern screens had been infected with a landscape 16:9 video layout which gives very limited vertical space. I can see half a page at once on my laptop, I can see two pages at once in a book.

My laptop, my primary machine, is slightly larger with a 17.2” 1920×1080 screen. I generally fit a little over half a page at a readable zoom, plus room for the PDF bookmarks on the sidebar. I have never found myself needing more than that — I don't read an entire page at a time, few people do, and it's simple enough to just scroll — with the spacebar and Shift+Space for down and back up if my hands happen to be at homerow, PageUp/PageDown if I'm not, or the scroll wheel if my hand's on the mouse.