Making PDF documents readable on a digital book reader

In a strict sense, PDF is not, never has been and never shall be an eBook format, one of the prime reasons for this is that a PDF is not reflowable.

So what does is mean for a format to be reflowable? It means that if you open the document on a PDA or another device with a viewing screen, the layout and text of the document/book will automatically fit the screen. Therefore, PDF being a fixed format, doesn't fit (pun intended).

A lot of different hacks have been floating around the mobileread forums, some have even produced their own python based scripts. One of the many solution that got my attention was the simple and elegant algorithm which Huang Ying (AKA "Caritas") implemented.

1. Convert pdf to image. I use pdftoppm of xpdf. Such as:
pdftoppm -r 180 -f 245 -l 245 -gray -aa yes a.pdf a
2. Analyse the generated images. Break page into lines.
3. Divide each line long enough to two segments.
4. Rearrange the segments into a new page, with half of the width.

The current latest version is pi v0.6 which slices the document and sets is together into a single resliced pdf. Quite handy I daresay. The tools are posted in this thread.

Other solutions apply a common method of cropping the pages so that a minimal amount of useless document area occupy the screen. Such processed PDFs are often read in a landscape layout and with a "fit to width" format enabled. One such script can be found here , courtesy of "Hanselda"

In retrospect, I must say that you can't blame the different eBook readers for their inability to make the PDFs "readable", however, they should be punished for not having a proper zoom. The PDF format is rigid, so it's not fair to expect a reflowable PDF document once you download it into your reader. But this is also a key point to why all serious publishers should quit selling PDF versions of books unless they are reflowable.

Conclusively:
Don't buy a PDF eBook before checking it's reflowability, if you have loads of PDFs you like to read, like papers on Category Theory, Monads or whatever, don't give up! Most of us sitting with technical PDFs know they become grossly distorted when converted to something else, like Html or whatnot. But there are tools and various methods for making them readable. And surely I believe reflowable formats will become increasingly popular. Try out "Caritas" tool, I'm sure you'll like it.


/Gf

Handy links and firmware upgrade

I upgraded my Cybook Gen 3 firmware from V 1.0 to 1.1 today (just a minute ago), and I must say it was painless. I got the information about the new firmware from The official Bookeen blog and the new firmware from The Support Page which requires you to have a login.

I just downloaded the firmware update, put it on the SD card, rebooted the device, following the very simple instructions and voila. Done.

I hope a lot of firmware upgrades will follow!

/Gf

PDF support is ... not impressive

After buying "Making Money", I also downloaded a set of different papers on Arrows , Category Theory, Lambda calculus and of course, Philip Wadler's excellent paper on monads (to honor him) into the Gen3.

Of course, one expects to be able to zoom if the pdf doesn't fit well. This is what I thought, but alas; no. The pdf in question was not readable unless I used an electron microscope, even if I set the layout to "Landscape" and "Fit to width", searching the documentation for zoom availability, it is never mentioned how you zoom manually. After some time, I resigned, accepting the harsh fact that there is no manual zoom levels available for the Gen3, what is referred to as "zoom", is actually the three different fits "Fit page, Fit to width, Fit height", which can be used in combination with "Landscape" and "Portrait", giving a total of 2*3 = 6 different "zooms" (most being equally or worse unreadable with a PDF).

A bit shocked by this, I surfed in on the Bookeen page, and found the forums, doing a quick search on "PDF support" or simply "PDF", reveals yet a shocking fact! Most readers out there seem to have the same problem! So, the solution?

Cropping. Simply remove all the white edges on your documents, (another forum post suggested converting the whole PDF into images), I must admit I haven't tested that, since the cropping method worked fine for me. Of course, you must have some program for this, but Adobe Acrobat Pro will suffice perfectly. On linux, imagemagick's convert should work as well. There are surely hundreds of different solutions to this, but It did the trick for me; fortunately I had Adobe Acrobat Pro in Windows Vista, thus making this easy.

Conclusively:
It sucks not to be able to zoom with different manual levels, it sucks that almost no portable eBook reader handles PDF in a descent way. Cropping is your answer for the moment, converting the PDFs into another format will only degenerate the PDF-file to something unreadable. This must be fixed in firmware releases.

Update:
Selecting Advanced -> Advanced Editing -> Crop Tool -> "Remove white margins" made the PDFs extremely more readable with Landscape -> Fit to width.

/Gf