got a new iphone very recently (yay verizon!).

i had waited two-and-a-half years to update,
because i didn't want to renew an at&t contract.

so, as you would suspect, my new phone is a lot
faster than my old one was...  (it was a plain 3g,
not even a 3gs, so the speed difference was big.)

so i'm now doing more things with the iphone
than i had been doing before.  including e-mail.
(thus, this listserve.)  and clicking on .pdf links.

the .pdf viewer in the old iphone was very slow,
which is why i'd never gotten into that habit, but
with the new iphone, the process is not painful...

so i opened some of the .pdfs i've been creating,
and reminded myself that an 8-inch-high page
is just a smidgen too big for the safari .pdf-app.

so i'm gonna be reducing that default to 7 inches,
or somewhere around that, depending on results.

***

i also got an ipad.  (the cheapest model available,
since the newer version will be here pretty soon.)
so i'll be playing around with that as well.

these fixed-width units will soon be very popular.
(that's an understatement, intended to be funny.)

and they give new life to a fixed-pagesize format
like .pdf, even though i wanted it dead years ago.

as far as i can tell, if you can customize the .pdf
to your specific preferences, it'll work very nicely
on an iphone or an ipad, maybe better than .epub,
since there's a lot in .epub you cannot customize
when displayed in the default ibooks viewer-app.

i'll know more after some experimentation.

but if anyone has any experience themselves,
i'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions...

-bowerbird