PDF 2-columns -> 1-column?

Apologies if this is an OT or a question that
has been asked before.

I’ve amassed a ton of research papers in PDF
format and catalogued them in DTPro.
The docs are almost always formatted as
2-columns, except for the title/author/abstract etc.

I often find myself viewing these on my MBP
using DTpro’s viewer (full-screen mode).
I am somewhat visually challenged so I
tend to zoom in so much, but in doing so
I need to touchpad-scroll way too much.

Is there a simple method to possibly temporarily
reformat these dual-column docs to be single,
so that one can view these docs in up-down fashion
instead of up-down-left-right-up-down?
:laughing:

Sorry, I don’t know of any simple answer, except a 30-inch screen, or portrait mode on a 20- or 23-inch screen.

I subscribe to several scientific journals, e.g. Science, that provide both HTML and PDF online versions. I prefer to read/capture material from the HTML version as selected text and images (ignoring ads, etc.), precisely because that’s much easier to read later on.

As I recall, Acrobat Professional lets one “tag” column laid out pages for linear viewing and I tried that out some time ago for Federal Register reading. But I decided it was too much of a hassle.

That’s exactly what I do at my office :slight_smile: but
the problem is when I’m on the go w/ my laptop. :slight_smile:
My field generally uses PDFs only for distribution,
and older papers are TeX or PS converted to PDFs,
some even non-OCR scanned images stuffed into PDFs(!).
Hmm, perhaps this “split vertically and linearize”
feature ought to be directed at Apple or Adobe.
Unless there’s some 3rd-party util out there(?).