Saturday, June 20, 2020

reMarkable "real" landscape mode (feature request)

I recently bought a reMarkable tablet, that I mainly use to review PDF reports from students and research papers. The tablet works very well, and allows me to carry out these very time consuming tasks outside in the sun when weather permits. The 10.3 inches display makes it very portable compared to the bigger 13.3 inches screen options, and the screen size is fine for one-column documents, such as masters theses, books, or some research articles. However, most research articles I review are in two-column format, which makes the text too small to read on this tablet, at least for my eyes. The zoom option is not optimal because it has to be tweaked manually every time the portion of the page to be viewed is changed, and this needs to be done at least four times per page (in most cases it is not enough to push the view rectangle to the four corners of the page).

A very simple solution, that I hope reMarkable will add to future releases of their software, would be to have a "real" landscape mode, as illustrated in the example below. When changing to landscape mode, it would be great if not only the controls would change but also the PDF view. This way, the text would become big enough, and the only change of view necessary for each page would be to show the top or bottom part of the page (no fine tweaking needed). As a bonus, it would be great if there were gestures associated with moving up and down the page, for example swiping up and down, whereas swiping left and right will change page as usual.

This simple functionality, that is unfortunately not available as of version 2.2.0.48 of the software, would make the reMarkable even more competitive compared to the 13.3 inches tablets such as Sony Digital Paper, Onyx Boox, or the GoodEReader just to make some examples.


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