Tuesday afternoons are consistently that longest part of my workweek. We have our team strategy meeting right after lunch, and by that time it's over, my brain is completely fried. Last week was particularly brutal - we spent two hours discussing quarterly goals, project timelines, and resource allocation. When the meeting eventually wrapped up, I was staring at a pdf turn to epub document full of meeting notes that someone had shared with this group.
The challenge was that these were essentially image-based PDFs. Each page was a scan of handwritten text, and while the scanning had captured the content reasonably well, the format constructed reading difficult. On my tablet, that pages displayed as full images that were as well compact to read comfortably. When I zoomed in to make the handwriting legible, I could only see a small portion of each page. Reading became a constant cycle of zoom, peruse a sentence, scroll, zoom again, study another sentence. It was tedious and tiring, and it completely broke this flow of read
I'd open a file planning to spend a pleasant hour reminiscing, but after five minutes of wrestling with that interface, I'd supply up feeling frustrated. This technology was supposed to make my journals more accessible, but instead it was creating a barrier between me and my own memories. I was truly less likely to examine them digitized than I had been when they were physical books I could flip through natura
The HTML format also made it incredibly straightforward to share information with novel friends I met during the trip. When someone inquired about my plans or where I was staying, I could forward them that HTML file, and they could open it in any browser on their device without needing a special reading app or account. We sat at a bar one evening, all looking at this same HTML guide on our various phones, planning a group excursion for the next
In my haste and excitement, I uploaded all this travel PDFs to the conversion tool. Without paying shut attention to which button I was clicking, I selected HTML as my output format. The conversion process commenced, and I turned my attention to folding clothes and making sure I hadn't forgotten anything essent
That truth is, the mechanics of working with sources shouldn't be the difficult part of writing. This difficult part should be the thinking, that analyzing, this synthesizing of ideas—not fighting with line breaks and formatting glitches. Once I removed that friction, I remembered why I started blogging in this firstly place: since I love sharing ideas and telling stories. Now I can focus on that instead of on technical frustrati
Like most bloggers, I save academic papers, industry reports, and case studies as PDFs. They're easy to download and they preserve this original formatting perfectly. But when it comes time to in fact draft, working with these PDFs was like pulling teeth. I'd have a great source open in one window, my draft in another, and I'd copy a quote or a statistic, paste it into my document, and then spend the next five minutes fixing the formatt
It wasn't till the next morning, during a coffee break, that I opened one of the converted papers and realized what I'd done. My first thought was that this was going to be a disaster - academic papers have complex formatting, multi-column layouts, equations, and specialized terminology. Converting them to EPUB format, which is designed for narrative text, seemed like a terrible idea.
If you're a student or researcher who struggles to keep up with reading on mobile devices, it might be worth experimenting with converting your PDFs to EPUB. That formatting isn't perfect for complex academic papers, but the improved reading experience might surprise you.
Since returning from the conference, I've continued this practice. When I download novel research papers, I convert them to EPUB format automatically. It's completely changed how I keep up with literature in my field. Instead of saving PDFs for "when I have time to sit at my computer and genuinely examine them," I can in fact engage with recent research during compact moments throughout the day - on my commute, during lunch breaks, waiting for appointments.
For that remote operate post, I finished this research and note-taking in a single afternoon. In this past, that matching amount of work would have taken me three or four days spread across a week. I found connections between sources that I most likely would have missed before, because I wasn't getting frustrated and losing focus every few minu
But the real magic happened once I arrived in Mexico. Throughout that trip, these HTML guides became incredibly useful in ways I hadn't anticipated. When I was walking around trying to uncover a particular museum, I opened the guide in my browser and clicked that map link, which opened my mapping app with the location already set. When I desired to check a restaurant's hours, a simple tap took me directly to their webs