It is not a surprising fact that most people find it hard to read and navigate a LaTeX document when on the phone. LaTeX defaults are designed for printed paper and when viewed on phone, people run into these issues:
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The large paper size leads to very small font size when the page is viewed as a whole in portrait mode.
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Landscape mode requires that the phone be held horizontally which is usually inconvenient and requires a lot of scrolling.
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Many a times, one has to zoom into a small part of the document and then move horizontally following the line. This makes navigation a headache.
So let's try and produce a version of the document suited for mobile viewing perhaps? Reading ought to be easy and natural, the design of the document should get out of the way and let us concentrate on the content. Hence, I present to you this format. The template.xml file included with this, will allow you to easily switch between compiling for desktop and mobile viewers. How hard is it to just compile twice and put out two files instead of one, if it affords the viewer a better experience and correspondingly increases the chances your document will be read properly?
If you have a .tex
file which you want to compile for mobile viewing:
- Download this repository or even just the
template.xml
file. - Create a copy of the
template.xml
file. - Copy and paste the preamble from your existing file into this copy.
- Copy and paste the main document part from the existing file into the copy.
- Save and compile this new file.
If you thought that the above instructions were too simple, then congratulations! You have realised an important thing: It's not that hard to do this.