Beating Paper

[Ryan King <rking panoptic com>]

Here's a fundamental mismatch between paper .pdfs and on-screen .pdfs: The
aspect ratio of paper is taller, where screens are wider, and columned text
forces the on-screen version to either shrink the text (which also wastes the sides of the screen) or to scroll backward for each column.

Has anyone come up with a solution for this?

One would be to allow the user to repeat each page times N columns.

What do you all think of such a feature? It could be a fairly buried
feature to avoid distracting users who don't need it (such as putting it
below the "View" menu options, titled something like, "Repeat pages...",
which could bring up a dialogue explaining why it is useful and have an
input box for the number of repeats). Or, it could even be further buried
behind a command-line option.

One quick problem is the page numbers. I lean towards just letting them get
multiplied along with the artificial repetitions, but if someone else felt
that they should reflect the original document then I would not disagree.

Or maybe the idea is crazy. If it is too much so, I suppose I will just
write a ruby+pdftk script to burst columnar pdfs apart and cat them back in
multiples.

Any feedback is welcome.
-rking