SkinnyPDF

Today, someone on Twitter took me up on my offer to reformat PDFs for them and sent me a ZIP file with 10 PDFs. I reformatted all of them and sent them back within 3 hours.

As I mentioned in my initial post, I am still running my prototype code by hand and creating a manual configuration for each PDF file individually because I have not had time to create a desktop app yet.

It took me ~2 hours to reformat all of the PDFs, but I also took the opportunity to add some features to the code to support use-cases that I had not seen before.

My code works on academic papers that use the 2-column format. Basically, my code turns each page into 2 separate pages with one column on each page. This leaves room for note taking.

Previously, I had not seen papers that have images/tables/diagram on the bottom of pages (they are usually at the top of pages). So, I added the ability for me to set custom values for the top and bottom margins of papers so that I can correctly handle both use-cases.

I am really glad that I am intentionally doing "things that don't scale" and requiring people to email me PDFs so that I can manually reformat them.

1. It forces me to use the product regularly and identify bugs/issues.
2. It is great motivation to improve the product based on #1.
3. It forces people to start a conversation with me. I ask for feedback each time I reply with reformatted PDFs and people are responding with great feedback. Plus, most of them love the output, which is very encouraging and motivating!

I am a researcher and part of my job is to read a LOT of academic papers.

Historically, I downloaded PDFs to my local desktop and read papers using Preview on OSX, which works surprisingly well for my purposes. However, I often get distracted by other things on my computer (email, twitter, etc) while reading the paper.

I engage with the content much better when I print out the PDF and read it away from my computer/phone/other distractions. Each PDF is easily 10-18 pages, which starts to get out of hand given the number of papers I read.

I purchased a reMarkable 2 tablet to minimize paper waste and maintain the ability to read PDFs distraction free. It has an e-ink screen, pen for writing notes, and no browser, no apps, no distractions.

Sadly, reading PDFs on the tablet is not a great experience. The margins of most academic papers are too small to write meaningful notes while reading the paper. Most papers in my field use a classic 2-column format. Clearly, I only ever read one column a time, so...

I wrote SkinnyPDF to reformat the PDFs to optimize them for note taking. Each page is split into 2 pages, one column per page. That leaves plenty of whitespace for taking notes.

I shared sample output from my prototype on twitter here and got 83 likes and 25 retweets.

The prototype is requires custom configuration for each PDF, but I am working on building a desktop app so that people can use it themselves.

Instead of waiting to finish the desktop app, I told people to email me PDFs and I would email them back the reformatted version. 7 people reached out with PDFs to reformat and most of them replied with feedback!

A very exciting start.