OT: central limit theorem

PDFs are a dreadful format! Maybe there's a high-end e-ink that processes them effectively but they look like s*it on the cheaper ones like most of the Kindles with e-ink displays.

I hate reading on an LCD I stare into an LCD half the live long day anyway, blech.

Gotta enforce a one book in, one book out rule man. I've never lived on my own in a residence spacious enough that I had the luxury of just stockpiling tons of stuff in case it might come in handy someday. I don't have an attic, garage, or basement!

Ikea shelves are made of veneered particle board, and can creep under steady load. Is it possible to flip the shelf planks upside down, so they start to creep back towards straight?

If the shelf plank material is creeping, this won't work.

Joe Gwinn

Composites, like the Ikea particle board, tend to sag. I got a nice barbeque table where the propane tank can sit on the lower shelf, but in a matter of days it took on a serous sag. It's some plastic composite.

Like many things that one buys these days, the first thing is to redesign it.

Add a center support of some kind.

Yep! The shelves aren't symmetrical front to back, but they are side-to-side.

Ikea has made a number of nightstands over the years that for whatever reason seem to have openings very close to 19", add a couple Middle Atlantic rack rails and you can house all sorts of gear in them:

They definitely have the "manufacturing" down to a science, though. I've assembled a number of their flat-packs over the years and I can't recall one that was ever short a part, or conversely, contained a single spare part.

Did Heathkit provide spares with their kits? Well, guess we know why they're out of business..

The OP might want to upgrade to Ivar shelves. I’ve got probably a dozen sections, 7 feet tall, and Ikea still sells them, I think.

Inexpensive, solid wood, good looking, super strong, and last forever.

Otherwise they stink.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Or put on a backing sheet and knock some nails through the backing sheet into the shelves. It isn't elegant. I've built bookcases where I've rebated the frame so that the backing sheet didn't show when viewed from the side, but my wife thought that this was more trouble than it was worth.

We owned a lot of books and the default bookshelf was mounted on brackets screwed into plugs let into the wall. I'd had a masonry drill even before we got married.

My great-grandfather would have been scandalised. I've now got the glass-fronted bookcase he built to complete his joinery apprenticeship some 150 years ago, and it is much more elegant piece of work.

PDF's are fearful. It is under control of one company, Adobe. It is changed without notice. I regret the change away from PostScript that at least was defined.

Groetjes Albert

They look a bit weak and feeble to me.

My books are all in Billy bookcases from the same vendor and apart from them changing the available veneers (discontinuing my favourite cherry) have never given me any trouble. I overload some of them too!

You can turn the loose shelves over to even out the curve. Not so for the fixed ones but they have additional support from the back board.

I don't run any Adobe software. I run several programs that export PDFs, and a viewer/virtual printer program handles the rest. Firefox will view PDFs too.

PDFs look good and are a good way to deliver manuals and such.

My GF and I share some floor space in a spare room for our "library" and while these seem pretty sturdy for my GF's paperbacks, for texts like AoE III and the like a bit lacking. I'm definitely going to suggest an upgrade and/or swapperooni.

I have the Ikea Bror system for my workspace:

which synergizes great with an electrically-adjustable worktable with a high lift; allows full access to top and bottom storage with a minimum of crouching.

I looked into it. It complies to an ISO standard, ISO 32000. At least it is open. You can even have a copy for free. You must log in, and your copy is watermarked, Adobe has probably a great say in how this standard evolves, but at least it is open.

So PDF is not as bad as I surmised. I concede your point, looking good, easy to comprehend, is a priority for a manual.

Groetjes Albert

PDF is better that WORD. See my other response.

What? That is stupid. I don't go for the looks. OTOH convert a pdf document into UTF8 rather than a graphical format.

I'm writing a program to read TIFF's in behalf of ocr. In TIFF there are several compression schemes that are possible, e.g. one of those is the black and white Fax machines. TIFF is worse than PDF, and you couldn't search it for text content.

Groetjes Albert