While reading PDFs on mobile screens is improving, with `swipe and pinch,’ it’ll probably always be easier to read text of the right font size that flows to fit the margins, i.e., mobile-optimized HTML or ePub. The comprehensive Calibre suite can convert both the PDF and website HTML versions of scientific articles into ePub, but the results are seldom pretty: two-column PDF layouts are often mangled, as are sidebars and javascript in website HTML pages. Few publishers actually offer ePub versions, despite the clear benefit to the reader, and the relative simplicity (for the publisher) of making an ePub from the HTML version. However, several publishers do provide XML versions of articles, generally using the NLM Journal Publishing DTD (PLoS), or a derivative (e.g., Taxpub, as used by Pensoft). Here is a guide to converting these XML files to ePub.
ViewNLM-v2.3.zip
file.tax-treatment-NS0.dtd
DTD has no URL. In fact,
you can delete the DOCTYPE from any XML to speed up the conversion
(xalan
downloads the DTD from the web, by default).<img src=
in an
editor is needed, with an edit to match the name of the image files
already downloaded. An automated fix of the XML from doi refs to html
refs would be fairly easy, but I haven’t looked into this yet.Apart from the manual editing possibly needed in Step 5, this all only takes a few seconds. Steps 4 onwards:
$ java -jar ~/lib/java/xalan.jar -IN journal.pbio.1001220.xml \
-XSL ../ViewNLM-v2.3/ViewNLM-v2.3.xsl > journal.pbio.1001220.html
$ emacs journal.pbio.1001220.html
$ cp ../ViewNLM-v2.3/ViewNLM.css .
$ ebook-convert journal.pbio.1001220.html journal.pbio.1001220.epub
Finally, enjoy the article in your favourite ebook reader. FBReader is excellent and they even have a Meego version for the wonderful N9. Hopefully more publishers will come to post an NLM XML version, and, even better, an ePub version.