Lambda the Ultimate

This is more of a meta usability issue than a substantive one, but I think it might concern a number of us, so at the risk of straying too far off topic, here goes:

Up until now I've been killing a lot of trees printing out PL research papers, most of which are distributed as two column PDF's in ACM conference paper format.

I would much rather load them all into a Sony Reader or similar device so I could keep my entire technical library with me on a memory card.

Unfortunately, these PDF's aren't in "Tagged PDF" format, which is to say that they aren't annotated with structural meta data that would let a mobile device "re-flow" them for display on a small screen.

Has anyone figured out a way, short of buying an expensive copy of the full Acrobat publishing software, to automatically add this tagging meta data to our papers or to otherwise strip out two column formatting from PDFs so they could be viewed at a reasonable size in landscape mode without having to read the top left column, scroll down to the bottom half of the left column, then back up to see the top of the right column, and then back down again to see the bottom right quadrant of the page?

Maybe we could all agree on some sort of secondary raw text, rtf, or XML-based distribution format that would be more amennable to use on mobile devices. The fixed page size two column layout served us well in the age of print, but in an age of digital paper and e-ink it seems a tad sub-optimal.