I already knew Word would start displaying two pages at a time if you dropped the view percentage enough for them to fit–which isn’t as useful as it might be, because it’s showing odd:even pairs rather than the even:odd pairs you’d have in a printed document. (That is, you’ll see pages 1&2 together, not 2&3–but 2&3 are facing pages in any typical two-sided document.)

What I hadn’t seen before: If you keep dropping the view percentage, Word goes to a multipage view with more than two pages at a time, and keeps adding to that. At 20% (which gives a good large thumbnail showing overall layout, but no readable text), I get 28 pages (7 across, 4 down) on a 1280×1024 screen… Neat.

before, full-screen mode used to be 1-page,
even if you’d specified 2-up mode instead…

this finally brings the viewer to a usable state!

-bowerbird

just telling where the statement came from.
it’s probably something someone has been
saying for years and years, since it had been
accurate for a period of years, until recently.

and considering what most people use it for,
the adobe reader has indeed been slow, and
bloated too, and that hasn’t really changed…
(search functionality is notoriously lethargic.)

what _has_ changed recently is their move to
the flash-based “digital editions” reader-app,
which has not shown the rock-solid stability
that the adobe viewer has traditionally had…
and it might be a while before they get it back,
since flash is a technology which they bought,
rather than one they’ve birthed and nurtured.

still, with the big screens on our desks now,
the frozen-format of the .pdf isn’t nearly as
irritating as it once was. that’s the good news.

-bowerbird

Still, I’ll accept the notion that PDFs were historically less flexible than they are now (and can certainly be made less flexible)–and there’s no question that I use PDF in order to maintain that asset, that is, the display I intended. (People can override aspects of that display, but must do so by choice.)

There’s also no question that, in some people’s minds, it’s inappropriate for the author or publisher to maintain control of typography and layout–or even to care about anything but the text itself. I’ve seen that come through loud and clear in any number of cases…although, in the case of the unlabeled comment on the unlabeled blog post, I don’t believe that’s true.

previous versions did not, not unless the .pdf
was “tagged” by its creator, which was rare…

adobe doesn’t really tout this new capability,
however, since it plays against their “asset”
that a .pdf displays as the author intended…

but the statement wasn’t “another example of
sloppy generalization”, nor “anti-pdf”, since it
was based on years and years of experience,
which has only recently become “out-dated”…

-bowerbird