What this covers
- A 20 mm crop roughly doubles effective text size on a 10-inch screen
- Everything offline before the session, without exception
- Notifications undo every other improvement
- Keep the uncropped original for printing
A ten-inch tablet is very close to the ideal PDF reading device. It is roughly the physical size of the page the document was designed for, it weighs nothing, it holds a whole course, and it does not need a desk.
Out of the box it is also a mediocre one, for three reasons that are all fixable in about fifteen minutes.
One: the margins are eating your screen
A document laid out for A4 carries 20 to 25 millimetres of margin on every side. That margin exists so a printer can grip the paper and so the text is not uncomfortably close to the edge of a physical sheet. On a screen it does neither of those jobs.
On a 10.9-inch tablet displaying a full A4 page, that margin occupies about a third of the glass and contains nothing at all. Crop it off and the text expands into the space, which on our measurements takes the effective text height from about 2.4 millimetres to about 3.4 - a difference you feel immediately and stop noticing within a day.
Crop once, keep two copies
Cropping changes what is displayed and printed, so a cropped document prints with its margins gone. Keep the original for printing and a cropped copy for reading. They are the same file twice and disk space is not your constraint.
Cropping for a tablet
Two minutes per document, or per batch if they share a layout.
- Check the page size
The reader reports it. Most exam material is A4, which is 210 by 297 millimetres.
- Start at 15 mm on each edge
Conservative. It is quicker to crop again than to undo one that took a line of text with it.
- Look at the result, then go further
Most A4 documents take 20 mm comfortably. Some take 25.
- Watch the top and bottom
Running headers and page numbers live in the margin and are the first casualties. On a past paper this often does not matter; on a textbook chapter it might.
Preparing documents for a tablet
Two: everything has to be offline
Every study session that depends on a network connection is a session a network can end. The failure is rarely dramatic - a document will not load, you check something else while waiting, and an hour has gone.
Whatever you sync with, mark the folder as available offline and verify it by turning the connection off and opening three documents at random. Doing that check once is worth more than any amount of intending to.
Three: notifications
This is the one that undoes everything else. A tablet is a study device for exactly as long as nothing on it is trying to get your attention, and the default configuration of every tablet is the opposite of that.
The setting worth finding is the one that silences everything for a fixed period rather than the one that silences apps individually, because the second requires a decision per app and the first requires one decision ever.
What to change, in order of effect
Fifteen minutes, total.
| Change | Effect | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Silence all notifications during study | Largest single improvement, by a distance | 2 minutes |
| Crop margins on reading copies | Roughly doubles effective text size | 2 min per document |
| Make the folder available offline | Removes an entire category of interruption | 5 minutes |
| Compress anything over 10 MB | Faster syncing and opening | 1 min per document |
| Merge each paper with its examiner report | Makes you read the report | 1 min per paper |
Portrait, and continuous scroll
Portrait orientation matches the shape of the page and wastes nothing. Landscape shows two half-pages, which sounds better and reads worse.
For prose, continuous scrolling is more comfortable. For question papers, page-at-a-time is better, because the page boundary carries meaning - a question ends where the page ends, and scrolling past it half-visible is a small ongoing distraction.
Tablet or paper
Both, for different jobs.
Tablet
- Reading, reviewing, working through a topic pack
- Holds every document you own
- Searchable, where the document has a text layer
- Cropped, offline, silenced
Printed paper
- Any paper you are sitting under timed conditions
- Anything you will measure on - graphs, scale drawings
- No battery, no notifications, no possibility of drift
- Printed at 100 per cent scale, not fit to page
A tablet that is actually set up
- Reading copies cropped, originals kept separately
- Whole folder available offline, verified with the connection off
- Notifications silenced by a single setting
- Large documents compressed and checked for readability
- Portrait orientation, brightness comfortable rather than maximal
- Notes going somewhere that is not the PDF
Questions and answers
How much should I crop?
Start at 15 mm on each edge and increase to 20 or 25 once you have seen the result. Watch for running headers and page numbers, which sit in the margin and disappear first.
Does cropping delete the content in the margin?
No. It changes the page boundary, so the content outside it stops being displayed and printed but stays in the file. Never use cropping to hide anything sensitive - use redaction.
Is a 7-inch tablet big enough?
For a cropped document, marginally. For an uncropped A4 page, not really. If a small tablet is what you have, cropping goes from helpful to essential.
What about reading on a phone?
For a document laid out for A4, it is uncomfortable regardless of the software, because the page cannot reflow. Extracting the text is the better route when layout does not matter.
