Any advice on improving pdf/jpeg readability due to small player preview?

For my course, students must read academic journal articles; a very boring task  for them. So, I was planning on saving each page of the pdfs as an image. Inserting them in storyline and using the hotspots and lightboxes to bring their attention to certain information and pose thinking questions. My problem is that the player's size is too small and the images are impossible to read. I was thinking of using the scroll box but then the hotspots and lightboxes don't work because they don't scroll (to my knowledge). I'm unable to crop the images because many (even most) of the articles come in two columns per page. Any creative ideas on how to deal with this? The easiest way will be to change the size of the player to something larger that will allow for proper readability but I haven't found any information that this is possible.