Reflowing and annotating scientific papers on eBook readers

Abstract Working with scientific and technical papers on small screen devices, such as tablets and eBook readers, is difficult since these works are often typeset in multiple columns with a relatively small font size. On tablets, pan and zoom operations allow users to visualize the text in the desired size, however, tracing the text in multiple columns can be uneasy and not appropriate for studying and working with the scientific works. Moreover, these operations are slow on most e-ink eBook readers that have limited computation resources. Document reflow is in this case one option, but it is difficult to provide a satisfactory visualization of scientific and technical papers. In this paper, we describe one off-line tool for scientific document reflow that adopts document image processing techniques to generate one modified version of the original PDF organized as a single column text that can be easily visualized on eBook readers. Moreover, the tool allows the user to make free-form annotations on the modified paper using the tools of the eBook reader. These annotations are faithfully reproduced in the original two-column document.