Sitting on my desk chair, which is an exercise ball, and reading lengthy documents is not like curling up in an armchair by the fireplace with a good book.  My daughter gave me a Kindle for Christmas, so I've been experimenting with a better way to read computerized documents.

Newer versions of the Kindle can handle PDF documents.  (IIRC, the original Kindle could not.)  It is easy to get a PDF such as the

Programming and Data Management book onto the Kindle.  Download it to your computer, attach the Kindle and copy it to the documents directory just as you would do any file copy.



Then open the document on the Kindle, get out your magnifying glass, and you are all set :-(  Resizing the page to fit the Kindle screen does not produce a happy reading experience.  But if you enlarge it via Zoom, you have to scroll the whole page on every line.  The trick is to use the Aa key and rotate the page.  You then see short pages, but you see whole lines, and, at least to my eyes, the text is reasonably readable.



Much nicer than reading on my computer screen.



The Scripting, Python plugin, and R documents are all PDFs, as is the Command Syntax Reference, so you can have your whole SPSS Statistics documentation arsenal at your fingertips.  If you don't know where these files live, open them from the Help menu and use Acrobat to locate them.



I hope this is a useful tip, but I can't help you with the fireplace.