Editor's Note: These files have been blocked from being downloaded because it has been brought to our attention that the application as it currently exists includes an expired trial version of commercial software.


That's right. Back from a developmental hiatus, I bring to you the latest version of PDFRasterFarian (now renamed simply RasterFarian)!

Many new things have changed. Gone is AutoImager. Gone even, gasp, is ImageMagick! Also, RasterFarian now behaves much more like a normal Windows program. This probably isn't a big deal to those of you who were able to figure out how to get it to work before, but it'll be a big help to newbies. Lastly, it's now possible to start converting multiple files, have them get into a neat queue, and finish automatically. Very helpful, given the amount of time a single conversion takes.


On the image quality front, I've discovered a wonderful packaged called NetPBM. This thing sits in imagemagick's shadow, but it's actually much more powerful and has a much better interface. Not to mention MUCH, MUCH better documentation. Seriously, WTF is up with imagemagick's documentation?

NetPBM is able to do dilate. It also fixes some nagging issues with how imagemagick did the shrink and color reduction operations. E.g., instead of refiltering the image before resizing, netpbm lets me do a simple pixel mix. The output ends up sharper. Also, imagemagick had this perverse color-reducing scheme where it would try to find the four "optimal" colors for a palettized image. There was no way to tell it "no, you stupid crap, the sony reader can only use THESE four colors." With NetPBM, it's easy to specify this explicitly. So gone is the gray snow you'd sometimes see on backgrounds which should've been white (and on fields that should've been black).

NetPBM also introduced me to a new image processing step. Instead of sharpening, I now do "edge enhancement." The results are considerably sharper and clearer compared to 2.1.


On the installation front, we now have an installer that copies files into Program Files and sets up Start Menu entries. If you call pdfrasterfarian from the start menu, you'll get an ordinary windows dialog box asking you which file you'd like to convert and where to save it. Hopefully, in the future no one will try to install and ask "how do i install it" or "how do i run it."


On the queueing front, you can now start multiple conversions. They won't all happen simultaneously (taking up a huge amount of ram). Rather, they'll wait for eachother to complete and then start by themselves. It all happens automatically (with a couple new questions) when you run multiple instances simultaneously. Previously, if you tried that the program would simply fail.


Many things on the original "todo" and "known issues" are getting crossed off. I'm still planning to add DjVu support (probably before this comes out of beta) and also raw images input support (this one will be a tad more annoying). One-click profiles are in the works (but i'm not sure if there's a point since you can just configure the defaults and use Simple mode. try this, it's nice.)

I can't wait to try it! This is great news as I've been drooling over (PDF)RasterFarian and seem to be in the "newbie" category because I couldn't get the previous version to install. (It seems to have been a conflict with another program.) PDFs open up a whole new world on the Reader, so I am excited to see what they look like, and whether or not I will need magnifying lenses to read them.

Most amazing will be the ability to scan material into a PDF file on my all-in-one printer/scanner/copier and then read it on the Reader.

Woohoo!

hey alex. Install is quite nice.

I might have found a little bug, not sure, when converting a file, it checks "..RasterFarian\\software\...". I tought those double "\" was typoo, no big deal, seems to work still.

Good job, I appreciate it.

Glad to see a new revision Alex! I've actually held off on upgrading to the latest and greatest due to the amount of problems people had been reporting (besides, I was satisfied with how 2.1.4 worked so couldn't complain). Now that tax season is past and I have a bit more free time to do conversions, I plan on testing this out on some *hardly* readable comics I have & other PDF's that, in their current state, aren't Reader-friendly.

I can tell you that all my install problems are gone, and I'm up and running!!
Probably was stupid to pick a large document for my first trial... 422 pages on my slow PC, but I'll let it run and am anxious to see what comes of it.

So far, I have to say it's very clear how to get started also. I don't know what it will look like, but you sure made the process easy Alex.

Also noticed that you have a special option for two column documents so it can be split in quarters. That looks like a fantastic option.

Will let people know how it goes for me, and I'll probably try a document with columns next. Also maybe a document I tried first time I touched a Reader that was unreadable. That one is a tough test, but who knows, with a little help from RF... maybe "miracles" are possible. :)

Thank you, this is really wonderful stuff!

This is a great program! I have been eagerly waiting for testing this new release because with the development of this software I see endless advantages of reading pdf on the Sony Reader over other file formats. However, on my computer, it won't split the pdf page into half in the processed lrf file, even though it can split the page into quarters. The scenario is like this: A4 sized pdf input results in A4 sized lrf output. It's so strange. Another problem I encounter is that if I use auto-crop option, the produced lrf file will only contain blank pages. These problems also existed in previous versions. I don't know if anyone else has encountered these problems. Anyone can tell me what could be the cause? Thanks.

gdxf, to have the program "split the page in half" after you select the appropriate conversion mode, you have to switch the Sony Reader into Landscape. Do this by holding the Size button for 5+ seconds.

I've now updated the UI text a bit to make this step clearer. I must say, the UI screen asking and explaining layouts has had more evolution than almost anything else. Some developers take the darwinian view that you make a useable UI and not try to baby anyone or give it a second though (e.g. many of those working in unix/linux.) Meanwhile, other developers (like Apple) take it as their primary aim to remove everything that could take an iota of brainpower to figure out (the "simplest but no simpler" that keeps getting repeated to my ire). My opinion on this is that you have to keep trying to make the interface more and more intuitive, but then use that as an opportunity to make it more sophisticated in other places. This pushes progress and maintains the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) (no, seriously). Simplifying in order to complexify. For all the bad stuff that gets piled on microsoft, I think it's one of the few big developers that understands the inherent correctness of this approach.

anyway...

The autocropping causing blank pages, though, sounds like a serious problem. Can you a) post your PDF and b) use the "preview" function and then copy all the text that you see get printed?* That last step will tell me some debug info, but only if previewing also gives you blank pages.

*To copy text from a CMD window, right-click on the title bar (the bar that has the X and minimize buttons), choose properities, and then enable QuickEdit mode. This lets you highlight text and copy it by right-clicking on it. Copy everything, even if you have to scroll up.

This is really great stuff, I just picked up my Readers last Friday, and your app has made it possible for me to do what I intended with the device (portable tune books for traditional Irish music).

One feature that would be extremely helpful would be if the app could somehow respect any cropping that has been applied using Acrobat.

Here's the scenario. I have a book from a 3rd party that was printed formatted for letter size paper, and it has a massive table of contents already setup. Using Acrobat, I'm able to go into the doc, crop the margins off and save it, resulting in a book that has all the meta-data, and no margins when displayed using Acrobat Reader. I realize the crop info is just additional meta-data on the document. If I re-PDF it by printing it with either Acrobat PDF or CutePDF, I lose the table of contents.

If I bring this cropped book into RasterFarian, it doesn't appear to respect the cropping information in the PDF file when it rasterizes the page, so if the original doc has, for example crop lines and such at the edges of the pages, they show up again in the LRF file.

In a perfect world, it would be great if RasterFarian would use the crop information in the PDF file as the starting bounds rectangle for the auto-sizing functionality.

Alternatively, do you know of a way to retain the TOC meta-data when re-printing a document to PDF using the Acrobat PDF or CutePDF print drivers? That would also achieve the same results.

Another question is on how RasterFarian handles hierarchical table of contents in a PDF document, it appears to flatten the TOC in the final output LRF document. In my case, where I have over 1000 tunes with a TOC in the PDF doc that organizes them by name, key, rhythm, etc.. After running through RasterFarian, I end up with over 3000 individual TOC entries which are nearly impossible to navigate since there is no way on the reader to jump ahead when using the TOC. Any chance for support of hierarchical TOCs in a future release? That would be absolutely awesome!

Thanks,

Michael Eskin
San Diego, CA

Alex, thanks for your tips! Now I finally understand the how the split page works: it only works on the Sony Reader, not on the connect software as I originally thought. I wish I could adjust the overlapping area manually, but it seems it's the limit on the part of Sony Reader. As for autocropping leading to blank page, I got the following message:


---------------------------------------
Generating preview....
...Creating EPS file from PDF page
Error: PDF version 1.6 -- xpdf supports version 1.5 (continuing anyway)
Error: Unknown character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Couldn't find 'UniGB-UCS2-H' CMap file for 'Adobe-GB1' collection
Error: Unknown CMap 'UniGB-UCS2-H' for character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Unknown character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Couldn't find 'UniGB-UCS2-V' CMap file for 'Adobe-GB1' collection
Error: Unknown CMap 'UniGB-UCS2-V' for character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Unknown character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Couldn't find 'UniGB-UCS2-H' CMap file for 'Adobe-GB1' collection
Error: Unknown CMap 'UniGB-UCS2-H' for character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Unknown character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Couldn't find 'UniGB-UCS2-V' CMap file for 'Adobe-GB1' collection
Error: Unknown CMap 'UniGB-UCS2-V' for character collection 'Adobe-GB1'
Error: Unknown font tag 'F00'
Error (2120): No font in show
Error (2171): No font in show
Error (2235): No font in show
Error (2283): No font in show
Error (2322): No font in show
Error (2373): No font in show
Error: Unknown font tag 'F00'
...Performing autocropping
gawk: C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\modules\crop_ps.awk:19: EOF
gawk: C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\modules\crop_ps.awk:19: ^ syntax erro

gawk: C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\modules\crop_ps.awk:19: EOF print;
gawk: C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\modules\crop_ps.awk:19: ^ inval
' in expression
...Rastering PNG file from EPS file (this step may take several minutes)
NOTE: Some especially complex pages may take a VERY long time (e.g. an hour)
If this seems to be occuring, you may go into the Task Manager
and kill the gswin32c.exe process. This will result in a blank page.


WARNING: The page is blank. It's OK.
However, you will probably want to preview a page that contains text.

Opening MSPaint...
Note: This image will look MUCH different on an eInk screen.
Typically, it will look smoother and less bold.

Are you satisfied with the result?
y) yes
b) go back (return to conversion options)
p) preview (to preview another page)

I must say, the UI screen asking and explaining layouts has had more evolution than almost anything else. Some developers take the darwinian view that you make a useable UI and not try to baby anyone or give it a second though (e.g. many of those working in unix/linux.) I know that one is directed towards me :)

Seriously though, it's good to see you resuming work on RasterFarian. I'd have preferred it if we could have merged our work, but looks like we have slightly different priorities (and opinions) when it comes to implementing things.

In a perfect world, it would be great if RasterFarian would use the crop information in the PDF file as the starting bounds rectangle for the auto-sizing functionality. alex_d, I have stopped using bbox computation via Ghostscript in PDFRead because of this very reason. A much better approach is to simply convert a page to EPS, rasterize via Ghostscript using -dEPSCrop and then finally remove all pixels which have the background color. I do that via using PIL (http://pdfread.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pdfread/trunk/src/process.py?revision=7&view=markup), you can achieve the same effect by using pnmcrop (http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pnmcrop.html) from NetPBM (which you use). It will do very nice cropping, even more better than GS (You might want to leave it as an option though, like I have with --gscrop).

And there's one more advantage: Ghostscript problems on blank pages go away with this approach.

BTW, I was inadvertently using the image enhancement step you added via pgmenhance; the same thing is used internally in rbmake (which is the finally step for my 1100), so I've added it as an option in PDFRead, too ;)

eskin, right now it seems manual cropping doesn't get respected when you use "autocrop", but it is obeyed when you turn that feature off.

"In a perfect world, it would be great if RasterFarian would use the crop information in the PDF file as the starting bounds rectangle for the auto-sizing functionality."

Agreed.

I'm going to try implementing Ashkulz's suggestion, it's very elegant (esp. since there's even a netpbm exe for this). This ought to also fix gdfx's problem (though I have no idea why gawk isn't working for him). I was a little concerned before in trying such an approach because I wanted to keep the resize operation as a neat reduce by an integer (for the best crispness). However, I doubt the difference will be noticeable.

Ashkulz, tho, why do you think the ghostscript-based cropping is still worth supporting? Also, did you understand what that third guy was doing to get autocropping that doesn't quit after the first dark pixel?


Now, as for heirchical TOC.. asfaik, the Reader's TOC doesn't support nested levels or even indentation. (They're big believers in the Apple approach, but they're much lazier and it comes out even worse.) However, the Reader does support links inside LRFs. It should be possible to do something interesting with that. The simplest would be to redo a ToC with indentations with maybe 20-50 entries per page. Slightly more complex would be to have multiple levels of links (tho it's probably not very desirable for people who don't have 3k bookmarks). Even better would be to add some sort of "navigation panel" at the start of books. Maybe it could give you links to every 5th page (since you can't fn enter page numbers). Anyway, I'm talking too much. Anybody else have better ideas?

Also, i've never done anything with LRF links. a) how do you do it? and b) can you navigate between them in 2D?

Also, did you understand what that third guy was doing to get autocropping that doesn't quit after the first dark pixel?

Considering it is written in python using PIL, and is packaged up in a function, it would be easy to integrate into ashkulz's work. Sorry I don't have something written in C that could be readily integrated into RasterFarian. It not only trims the extra white space, but does so while maintaining the correct aspect ratio and centering the image. As I mentioned before, for scanned documents, where you'll inevitably have some dirty pixels, it works much better than the current use of the getbbox() method. Though the code may look a little clumsy, I never noticed any real speed penalty in image processing.

My schedule clears up in a couple of weeks. Hope to play again soon.

thanks, curiouser. I think me or ashkultz can use py2exe to convert your function into something that can be inserted into rasterfarian. Can you make a quick stand-alone py script that takes in a range of overlap 0-to-whatever and input from the pipe and outputs to the pipe in a netpbm format? If that's that at all complicated, any sort of input/output would be fine.

P.S. I'm not sure centering the image is best. If you view the document in landscape and you only have a trailing paragraph on the page, wouldn't it be better for it to go to the middle-top?

Since everyone seems to have such good luck with the install, I hate to report a problem, but...

First, I get a message saying "Xcopy" not a valid command or batch file.
Second, it tells me that .Net Framework 2.0 is not detected (nevertheless, the .Net Framework is installed, and I even reinstalled it to make sure). The install then opens a browser window to download the .Net Framework, but this is already installed. Installation proceeds, but then, while Rasterfarian shows up as a program group on the start menu, the program group is not populated.

Right-clicking does not show a Rasterfarian option.

Any suggestions?

tesseract, are you trying to install on a work/public pc or as a limited user (or on vista or..)? It seems there are security restrictions preventing rasterfarian from accessing the registry, creating shortcuts, or even using xcopy (which comes standard with windows). I can't tell you any more than that, but hopefully I've given you some ideas. If you manage to figure it out, please come back and share the info.

You can also use RasterFarian without installing it just by double-clicking PDFRasterFarian.cmd

I solved the installation problem by copying "xcopy.exe" (which was elsewhere on my computer; I believe it resides in the system32 directory; in any case there was a stray copy in the windows\servicepack directory) into the same folder where install.bat resides.

Thanks; I'm running XP Home, Service Pack 2. There's only one user on the machine. I guess my solution is more in the nature of a work around; but it did solve the problem. I running a ridiculously difficult pdf through now; I'll let you know the results.

ok, i'll bundle xcopy in the future. It won't be the first time i had to include a windows executable that should be on everyone's machines. I wonder how these things get lost... Windows File Protection should even kick in if it goes missing (I just tried deleting my copy and it comes back in a few seconds).

Let us know how the pdf turns out.

2.5.1 is posted with some very minor bug fixes and wording changes.

thanks, curiouser. I think me or ashkultz can use py2exe to convert your function into something that can be inserted into rasterfarian. Can you make a quick stand-alone py script that takes in a range of overlap 0-to-whatever and input from the pipe and outputs to the pipe in a netpbm format? If that's that at all complicated, any sort of input/output would be fine. I've tried curiouser's function, but I didn't find results to be as good that they would be with unpaper (http://unpaper.berlios.de/). Also, it works exclusively on PGM images, so it'd be easy to integrate in both RasterFarian and PDFRead. I'm already incorporating it in my next release, I'd advise you to do the same.

Attached a sample of running unpaper. The tricky thing is knowing what options to provide as default to the user....

A few questions:

1. What are the different "parts" in the download for? Do they all have to be extracted?
2. I just extracted Part 1 and the application seemed to work. Am I missing something by not extracting the other parts?
3. When the conversion was complete on my test, Connect opened and then hung. What happened here?

Thanks for helping a real newbe

Jim

ok. I think i'll default to pnmcrop for plain autocropping and have an unpaper option for scanned/noisy pdfs. We'll see what options have to be included, but with the preview feature it shouldn't be difficult for the user to figure out the right settings.

jgs, the "parts" is how WinRAR splits up a single archive into multiple pieces (there's a filesize limit on attachments). You have to download all of them, but telling winrar to unzip one will unzip all automatically (it's all one archive, not multiple archives). When conversion completes, connect should not launch automatically unless you double-click the lrf. You don't need to preview the file in Connect anyway. Keep in mind that what looks good on an LCD is precisely what looks bad on eInk, and vice versa. As for connect hanging... i don't know. It does that sometimes.

I am using WINZip to extract. Can I assume that it works the same as WinRAR (e.g. if I extract Part 1 then they all extract).

You are right, Connect did not automatically open. Connect still does hang sometimes.

Hi Alex,

OK, my computer was up all night processing this monster. The text has all sorts of odd formattting, similar to a three column blog. In Connect the text looks great, but on the Reader the text is a little light. If I could darken the text it would be great.

If the program is running properly is there any reason to upgrade to 2.5.1?

Best,

Tesseract, that's why there's all those settings for controlling Dilate and Edge Enhancement. The Dilate factor is the one you'd want to turn up (or rather down). Also, I hope you have your modes all straight now. If you convert in "halfs-of-a-page" but set the Reader to "portrait", you'll see the whole page but the text will be broken. Similar things happen vice versa.

Come to think of it... if halfs-of-a-page is the default mode for RasterFarian, and portrait mode is the default for the Sony Reader.... GODDAMIT. there must have been tons of people who tried it and thought "bah, what crap." you know what, i think i've just decided i hate users >=(

I tried it, and after running, showed "...expired, please contact ...@pdf-tools.com"?
and nothing converted out...

I think I miss something.
I installed 2.5.0 version but could not find any GUI....where is it?

I had problems with autocrap. If I enable this option , the output pdf is always blank without errors.
It worked only without autocrapping...very slowly.

thanks!

kurt, not even the gawk: EOF error that gdxf got? Doesn't matter, autocrapping will be redone in 2.6.

I think the path I'm going to take in 2.6 with the halfs-of-a-page bullshit is to just stop using the reader's landscape mode. I'll cut up the image like I do with quarters-of-a-page. No confusion, no lengthy explanations, no more posts. You'll also be able to set the overlap amount. Not sure why I didn't do this before.

astra, there's no gui, just better windows integration.

jimmy, the warning doesn't matter. if you tried processing a large file, the step just takes time. also, you have to click ok.

alex, thanks, that's wonderful news! I like the idea of the halfs of a page more than the landscape mode. I am also looking forward to an enhanced batch processing capability.

astra, there's no gui, just better windows integration.
Ah. Stupid me. Why did I think that the main improvment of the new version was GUI??? sorry about it :)

PDFRead 1.6 has been released (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10558). Please see the linked thread for details on the changes in this release.

alex_d, you might want to take a look at integrating the new cropping functionality I've added. If you want, I can package it up for you using py2exe (or even write some C code which works on PBMs) which you can then use in RasterFarian.

alex_d, I have a question for you.

I have a book in .PDF, and I had troubles with croping, meaning I had a top margin on my reader, but not in the .PDF file. I downloaded Acrobat Prof as you adviced me, but I don't know if I have to top margin before use RasterFarian or... ? And the margins happens after RasterFarian, which adds it. So I don't understand how to remove my top margin.

Also, on my reader, it is still a little small, the = and - sign looks similar, and small pics from the books looks awfull.

Is there anything I can do with RasterFarian ? I use laster version, I tried advanced mode and tweaked everything, couldn't get it better.

Thank you

I installed the 2.5.1 beta, it seemed to install without any issues, but I'm not seeing a listing in the context box for PDFs. I noticed in the file properties that it does have some sort of association with rasterfarian and PDFs. I forget how to get to the properties for the context listings, or I'd check it.

alex_d, I have to say, hats off to you. After trying many other forms of PDF to LRF optimization tools, yours by far has the best results, especially since 2.5 (all the previous versions gave me headaches with full processing).

Keep up the good work!

I've just tried your latest version of RasterFarian. In a word - Great!

I'm interested in converting journal articles (pdf files) so that I can enlarge them enough to make them readable (my old eyes need large fonts). When I enlarge the image the right side of the page is off screen.

What can I do to keep the image screen sized with large fonts?

Thanks in advance.

Dr. Siddons

drsiddons, please don't use the Size button to resize. You can only use one of the page-splitting modes.

bitgod, you probably don't have adobe reader installed. but since you're asking how to set it up manually, it's easy. Folder Options > File Types > PDF > Advanced > New.. and use this command: "C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\PDFrasterFarian.cmd" "%1" "%1". (the strange thing is when you do have Adobe Reader installed, this method doesn't work. In fact, the windows registry is pretty poorly designed on this issue and I don't know how to add a context menu that'll work no matter what program you've got installed.)

Jary, congrats on doing manual cropping. To get rid of any margins your page has to be exactly 4:3. Margins appear when it isn't (and i know, they ought to show up at the bottom not the top). Also, have you played around with the different page-splitting modes?

I have Adobe reader 8.0 installed. Just tried doing it from the programs menu, got an error that PDF library expired. Why do I always start these things when I should be going to bed? :) I'll try a full uninstall and reinstall tomorrow, see how that goes.


errr...what I said about working on this before going to bed...:) It worked, I wasn't paying attention to the DOS box when I typed the above stuff. So if it works through Programs, then that's fine and dandy.

I tried it, and after running, showed "...expired, please contact ...@pdf-tools.com"?
and nothing converted out...

That's exactly what I see:

Evaluation period expired. please contact pdfsup...@pdftools.com

I downloaded a userguide for my Canon POWERSHOT S2IS:
http://alpha02u.c-wss.com/inc/ApplServlet?SV=WWUCA900 - then PRODUCT/SOFTWARE MANUALS button, then "PSS2ISCUG-EN.pdf"

I want to have the user guide on my Sony reader for use away from home. I don't have a PDA or notebook. Great use for reader, I think.

I fixed the security limitation (I think this is a very clear case of Fair Use). When I try to use RASTERFARIAN 2.5.1 (Win XP, SP2), all I get is the word "COPY" (No user guide images). I would not mind getting the word COPY diagonally across the page as long as I got the user guide with it. Getting the manual without the word copy would be nice though.

The user guide does convert OK with COPY across the pages using PDFread. I would like to use RasterFarian too.

Amazing job. Is there any way people can give you a few dollars to thank you for your work ? By paypal or something ?
While I'm here, is there anyway of automating the conversion (all on the same settings) of tens or hundreds of pdfs so I can leave it running overnight ? I have lots of short documents I want to do in one go, but once I queue more than say 10 it all goes haywire (not surprisingly).

PS Often, after apparently successfully converting, the .lrf file does not appear, but an error file lrs2lrf.log instead, saying something along the lines of the one below. Is the \\ the error ? Why does it only happen sometimes and not others ?


Input File Name : C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\temp\temp.lrs
Output File Name : C:\Documents and Settings\Me\My Documents\Papers\Book.lrf
ファイルの整合性をチェックします
整合性のチェック完了
[Warning ] Publisherの文字列が長すぎて、表示しきれない場合があります。
書誌情報ファイルの整合性をチェックします
書誌情報ファイルの整合性チェック完了
[Error ] Can not find object. [line: 40]
[Error ] Can not find object. [line: 40]
[Error ] ＴＯＣの指定が異常です。 [line: 40]
ファイルが正しくありません
強制終了
次のファイルを削除します。:: C:\Documents and Settings\Me\My Documents\Papers\Book.lrf

"Error in line 40, TOC destination is invalid."
Check the TOC entries in LRS, the destination objid should point to a TextBlock or ImageBlock.

The user guide does convert OK with COPY across the pages using PDFread. I would like to use RasterFarian too. That's really surprising, as RasterFarian and PDFRead use the same underlying tools. I wasn't able to download the the PDF from the site you mentioned, could you attach it here so that alex_d can figure out why the problem occurred?

While I'm here, is there anyway of automating the conversion (all on the same settings) of tens or hundreds of pdfs so I can leave it running overnight ? I have lots of short documents I want to do in one go, but once I queue more than say 10 it all goes haywire (not surprisingly). You can use the batch script available for PDFRead (http://pdfread.sourceforge.net), available from this thread.

"Error in line 40, TOC destination is invalid."
Check the TOC entries in LRS, the destination objid should point to a TextBlock or ImageBlock. I think the problem is that the PDF file has references to pages which don't exist. I encountered the same problem in PDFRead, in which case I simply ignore those TOC entries.

Attached is the Book that I have been unable to convert from PDF to Sonmy format using RasterFarian. Recall I only got the pages with the word COPY not the user guide text. Sorry you were unable to d/l it directly from camera company site.

I found out that the enqueueing isn't working correctly. If you enqueue a 2nd task, the first task will complete, but the lrf-file will be gone. Probably because the temporarydirectory of both tasks are located in the same place, one will overwrite the other?

<double post>

just found out, after 15 hours of encoding, that there is a limit of 9999 pages for a book when using rasterfarian. After that, it will spawn convertprocesses until your pc crumble :)

athlonkmf, sorry. it's one of those things where you go "eh.. i could use 5 digits... but i mean really, who's going to ever convert 10,000 page books?" That's how y2k happened.

but seriously, where did you get this pdf? and how do you expect to navigate to any particular page using the reader's interface?

next time i do a release i'll up the limit, but for now you can use something like CutePDF to cut up the file.

Also, the queueing is a bit flakey but it should never overwrite the old lrf file. Did you use the same name twice?

athlonkmf, sorry. it's one of those things where you go "eh.. i could use 5 digits... but i mean really, who's going to ever convert 10,000 page books?" That's how y2k happened.

but seriously, where did you get this pdf? and how do you expect to navigate to any particular page using the reader's interface?

next time i do a release i'll up the limit, but for now you can use something like CutePDF to cut up the file.

Also, the queueing is a bit flakey but it should never overwrite the old lrf file. Did you use the same name twice?

I made the PDF myself, it's a manga-collection of 13 years of Detective Conan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detective_Conan) :)

But navigation won't be a problem, because the TOC is working fine with other collecttions. I just never had such a large file.
I've now generated the LRS-file myself to contain the 9999 files that are made, but lrs2lrf is still trying to parse it, it's been more than 10 hours now.... (and now looking for a faster alternative)

As for the queueing, i'm sure I haven't used the same name twice. But each time when I queue up tasks, the TOC of the 2nd task will be used in the 1st tasks. I think it's because of the doc_data.txt being overwritten.


Also... A very weird thing. On another computer where i've installed rasterfarian too, the rescaling is REALLY weird, it creates PNG-files over 1,5MB big and about 3500px resolution. I can't find out where the problem is. Could be that that computer has adobe installed...

It seems another instance of RasterFarian has been called
but hasn't yet begun/enqueued its conversion!

RasterFarian can't continue until either:
a) You complete the "set up" phase and begin or enqueue the other conversion
b) The other instance is told to quit (you enter q at the prompt)
c) You decide to "force start"



This message will appear by mistake if you had closed RasterFarian forcefully
If this is what happened, choose "force start"



Resolve multiple instances conflict:
w) wait
f) force start (only if no instance of RasterFarian is "setting up")


(press RETURN for default option)
(Type q then RETURN to quit)
[w]:

I got this error when I started it. Then I did force start. After selecting the file to convert, I got this error:

Please use the dialog box to specify an output file

'more' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.


!!!!ERROR: Output file cannot be written to!

C:\on writing.lrf


Possible causes include:
+invalid filename
+the file is already open
+insufficient file system permissions


Press any key to continue . . .

Any Ideas on what to do?

athlonkmf, you're starting to give some good reports. the TOC over-writing sounds like a bug. I've tried taking care that doc_data doesn't get overwritten but might have missed something.

PNG files are 3.5k pixels during intermediate stages of processing. are you saying that the final lrf is composed of those pngs and is hundreds of megs in size?

laythstag, looks like it's another one of those things where Windows is either mysteriously missing a file that it really ought to have or your PATH variable is incorrect. I'll just bundle the program more.com with RasterFarian and that will fix it.

athlonkmf, you're starting to give some good reports. the TOC over-writing sounds like a bug. I've tried taking care that doc_data doesn't get overwritten but might have missed something.


Just tried it out again. And the doc_data is indeed overwritten.


PNG files are 3.5k pixels during intermediate stages of processing. are you saying that the final lrf is composed of those pngs and is hundreds of megs in size?


Yes, for some reason, on the other computer, the final PNG and resulting LRF is composed of those 3.5k pixels png. While on my workstation, the final PNG is the correct size.

thank you so much. this program is simply amazing.

It is an amazing program. I have a newbie question since I blazed through the program and did a conversion over-night of a pdf book:

When I zoom there is no word-wrap like there is with books purchased from the SOny store. So the last few words on the right get cut off when I zooom. I realize PDF is just an image and that it is zooming on the page rather than making the letters larger.

Is there a way to get it to word-wrap or make the margins tighter when converting so I can have larger text? As of now it is readable when I go to landscape mode and use a medium zoom.

Thanks!

It is an amazing program. I have a newbie question since I blazed through the program and did a conversion over-night of a pdf book:

When I zoom there is no word-wrap like there is with books purchased from the SOny store. So the last few words on the right get cut off when I zooom. I realize PDF is just an image and that it is zooming on the page rather than making the letters larger.

Is there a way to get it to word-wrap or make the margins tighter when converting so I can have larger text? As of now it is readable when I go to landscape mode and use a medium zoom.

Thanks!


If you want wordwrap, then you should use bookdesigner. RasterFarian treats the pages as images, and does not change anything on textual level.
The margins can be set in the default-file (i think, haven't looked at at anymore)

There is a free program called pdf2html that is on Sourceforge.net which supposedly does a pretty good job converting PDF. Give it a go. If it works for your needs, then you can take the HTML, tos it into book designer and have a nice LRF when you are done.

I've written a tutorial so you can use MSH_LRSPARSER to do the final conversion step instead of LRS2LRF. This is MUCH faster for large files.

http://hightech.afmag.net/converting-pdf-to-the-lrf-using-a-rasterfarianmsh_lrsparser-combo.html

Just a FYI

athlonkmf... if you'd like to post patched versions and put your name in, you can go ahead.

edit: haha the "horz.adjustable" instead of "horz-adjustable" was when i did a 'replace all' about 10 versions ago. it's in kernel-lrs.cmd.

p.s. echo without carriage return is a bit tricky. but this this (http://www.paulsadowski.com/WSH/cmdprogs.htm) program will do it

athlonkmf... if you'd like to post patched versions and put your name in, you can go ahead.

edit: haha the "horz.adjustable" instead of "horz-adjustable" was when i did a 'replace all' about 10 versions ago. it's in kernel-lrs.cmd.



I know, i've patched it already on my computer ;)
But I thought I shouldn't tell others to edit the scripts directly, or they'd blame me when they break something.

I'll see if I can do a patched version later.
I don't know how to write it out in UTF-16 though.

And it seems that lrs2lrf doesn't accept the "images without path"-lrs... (IE, it was faster for me to just open the temp.lrs files and do some replace all then actually testing and patching rasterfarian as I was waiting for your batch-version too :2thumbsup )

doing utf-16...

I remember I had to insert the line:
cmd /A /C ECHO ^<?xml version=^"1.0^" encoding=^"UTF-16^"?^> > "%relpath%\temp\temp.lrs"
(instead of just ECHO ....) because of encoding problems. cmd /A is supposed to instruct echo to output in ansi. maybe you should try cmd /U? Also, I'm pretty sure that >> takes care to preserve encoding so if you start with a file that's in UTF-16, appending to it will also be UTF-16.


anyway, I've been meaning to rewrite all of this in c#
I've also been meaning to learn c#
The biggest problem right now is that CMD is a ridiculously, ridiculously bad language (ie, it's not even structured programming. you have to use fn gotos! and the gotos break the parts which Do try to be sort of structured! and types... wtf are types? you don't even have variables! every variable is like a "#define" and if it has certain characters, it'll break the code) and it's pretty frustrating to do anything sophisticated. I don't think microsoft ever even intended anyone to really use cmd scripts. you're supposed to use vbscript or jscript i guess. and back in dos days, BASIC.

doing utf-16...

I remember I had to insert the line:
cmd /A /C ECHO ^<?xml version=^"1.0^" encoding=^"UTF-16^"?^> > "%relpath%\temp\temp.lrs"
(instead of just ECHO ....) because of encoding problems. cmd /A is supposed to instruct echo to output in ansi. maybe you should try cmd /U? Also, I'm pretty sure that >> takes care to preserve encoding so if you start with a file that's in UTF-16, appending to it will also be UTF-16.


anyway, I've been meaning to rewrite all of this in c#
I've also been meaning to learn c#
The biggest problem right now is that CMD is a ridiculously, ridiculously bad language (ie, it's not even structured programming. you have to use fn gotos! and the gotos break the parts which Do try to be sort of structured! and types... wtf are types? you don't even have variables! every variable is like a "#define" and if it has certain characters, it'll break the code) and it's pretty frustrating to do anything sophisticated. I don't think microsoft ever even intended anyone to really use cmd scripts. you're supposed to use vbscript or jscript i guess. and back in dos days, BASIC.

I made a litle beginning (or more like an ending) to do a rasterfarian in C#, and managed to do the netbpm, create lrs and output to lrf part (only missing the ghostview part), but then I stopped because... "why should I program it, if you were doing a good job already?" It's better to leave it up to you because I know for sure that I won't have time to update it.

And my other program wasn't really well accepted anyway.


ps. i had major trouble going through the CMD-code though.. with all the goto, lack of syntax highlighting and natural variablenames, it's kinda hard to read through it...

I made a litle beginning (or more like an ending) to do a rasterfarian in C#, and managed to do the netbpm, create lrs and output to lrf part (only missing the ghostview part), but then I stopped because... "why should I program it, if you were doing a good job already?" It's better to leave it up to you because I know for sure that I won't have time to update it.

And my other program wasn't really well accepted anyway.


ps. i had major trouble going through the CMD-code though.. with all the goto, lack of syntax highlighting and natural variablenames, it's kinda hard to read through it... Well, I think that you should've continued it and done the conversion. If someone wants to "hack" the current rasterfarian, to understand the existing code is not easy at all. as alex has mentioned that he has no love for the current code, so you should step up and do the conversion -- that's the spirit of open source :) Then alex_d and you could've continued the development with a much better codebase....

Also, if you want you can refer to the source code for pdfread (http://pdfread.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pdfread/trunk/src/) -- it's in python, but the tools used and intent are very much similiar.

Well, I think that you should've continued it and done the conversion. If someone wants to "hack" the current rasterfarian, to understand the existing code is not easy at all. as alex has mentioned that he has no love for the current code, so you should step up and do the conversion -- that's the spirit of open source :) Then alex_d and you could've continued the development with a much better codebase....

Also, if you want you can refer to the source code for pdfread (http://pdfread.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pdfread/trunk/src/) -- it's in python, but the tools used and intent are very much similiar.

The thing is, I archive devving in priorities. At that time I was writing my program http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11261 to easy convert a bunch of manga-collections. Because there was no other suitable solution for that, I've made it.
Then I wanted to extend it with rasterfarian's capabilities in order to cut down on processing time and actually batch things. That's why I converted the final steps. But that's when I thought... why spend my time on it, if my program combined with a small patched rasterfarian do the same trick too.

Unfortunately it seems that others do not like or has no need to use my program, because there weren't any comments. So I ditched the project with the idea "hey, it works for me as it is now".

If there really is truely a need for a rasterfarian in C#, I might consider to do a base start (probably not fully OO), but if there are none, I should spend my time on other projects (because I don't really need it myself).

processing folders of images as input to rasterfarian (and also some special features for scanned docs) is a big item on the rasterfarian todo.

as for the rasterfarian code: the core conversion code is pretty neatly contained in kernel-processing.cmd. All the other logic is pretty useless to look at because the same stuff can be done much more elegantly in a better programming language. E.g. a language that, incredibly, has arrays. I won't even mention structures. Godforbid classes. Reading source code before writing your own isn't usually a good idea unless your goal is nothing more than porting.

Anyway, i've started doing a little bit in c# already. Definately fully OO. This is in part to practice coding c# itself, but I also like the new features like interfaces and properties. I know it's nothing that classes aren't able to accomplish. But don't you hate the people who say C is just as good for doing OO as C++? Syntax does matter.

I'd like to also see modularity in the way rasterfarian works, to make it easier to add input or output formats (or the same format but alternate utility) or processing filters.

Re a gui. I'm not able to do it yet, but it would great if there was a nice workflow for picking input docs, manually cropping them, choosing filters and setting parameters, and having a dynamic preview for all that. This would be the real point of c#.

processing folders of images as input to rasterfarian (and also some special features for scanned docs) is a big item on the rasterfarian todo.

as for the rasterfarian code: the core conversion code is pretty neatly contained in kernel-processing.cmd. All the other logic is pretty useless to look at because the same stuff can be done much more elegantly in a better programming language. E.g. a language that, incredibly, has arrays. I won't even mention structures. Godforbid classes. Reading source code before writing your own isn't usually a good idea unless your goal is nothing more than porting.

Anyway, i've started doing a little bit in c# already. Definately fully OO. This is in part to practice coding c# itself, but I also like the new features like interfaces and properties. I know it's nothing that classes aren't able to accomplish. But don't you hate the people who say C is just as good for doing OO as C++? Syntax does matter.

I'd like to also see modularity in the way rasterfarian works, to make it easier to add input or output formats (or the same format but alternate utility) or processing filters.

Re a gui. I'm not able to do it yet, but it would great if there was a nice workflow for picking input docs, manually cropping them, choosing filters and setting parameters, and having a dynamic preview for all that. This would be the real point of c#. I think that making RasterFarian modular would go a long way in making features easy to add. I was at the same stage with PDFRead a while ago, and I made the same decision to re-write PDFRead for more maintainability (I think we discussed this in another thread). After that, adding support for new formats was a breeze (see this (http://pdfread.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pdfread/trunk/src/input.py?view=markup) and this (http://pdfread.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pdfread/trunk/src/output.py?view=markup)) -- even adding more steps to the pipeline was simplified to a great extent, I didn't have to go hunting all over the code. I hope you find the time to do that!

Just thought I'd pat all of you guys/gals on the back for the hard work you've put into making these tools for converting to Reader-viewable format. I've tried each of the and use whichever works best for the project I'm working on. If you're trying to develop something new, don't get discouraged by lack of comments, it could just simply mean that people are satisfied with what you've done and have no comments on how to improve it; not that no one is using it. You're all great for simply taking the time to create something new and sharing it with the rest of this community. Thanks! :thumbsup:

Thank god I've got a dual-core machine, or this would take forever. Is there any way I can batch convert these 300+ pdfs I've got in this one directory so I can just let it run all night?

How about adding TOC support.
PDFRead already supported pdf file TOC.
Whenever I try to search a specific in very big book. It takes a lot of time.

How about adding TOC support.
PDFRead already supported pdf file TOC.
Whenever I try to search a specific in very big book. It takes a lot of time.

Rasterfarian already does a TOC-conversion if the PDF has a TOC.

Rasterfarian already does a TOC-conversion if the PDF has a TOC.

I am sorry. I did not know that.
It works very well.

-----------------
And I have a question about margin.

Jury already mentioned about this.
After I crop pdf, I can see the margin in lrf.
I think rasterfarian put some margin automatically.
Is there some option to control margin?

thanks.

i have try many setting and i am still fustrated!
can someone or alex post their setting to make my pdf look like one of alex convertion (the one where he shows his science book converted)
all my convertion look ok... but still it not as sharp...

noob need help...

I am sorry. I did not know that.
It works very well.

-----------------
And I have a question about margin.

Jury already mentioned about this.
After I crop pdf, I can see the margin in lrf.
I think rasterfarian put some margin automatically.
Is there some option to control margin?

thanks.

when the PDF-page is 4:3 the margin would be minimized, otherwise, the reader will automaticly set margins.
In the defaults.cmd in the rasterfarianfolder, you will be able to set the margins manually. But as said, it will only work on 4:3-sizes.

Hi,

Any help for those of us who would like to use your software in Linux? Is the source code available to attempt compilation?

Thanks,
Alex

Hi,

Any help for those of us who would like to use your software in Linux? Is the source code available to attempt compilation?

Thanks,
Alex

rasterfarian is more like a set of scripts with runs a pdf-reader, image processor and LRF-creator and is designed for windows. For linux, you could write your own script for it.

rasterfarian is more like a set of scripts with runs a pdf-reader, image processor and LRF-creator and is designed for windows. For linux, you could write your own script for it. Or you can use PDFRead (http://pdfread.sourceforge.net), which already works on Linux and OS X.

Are there any manuals or FAQ for how to adjust settings in RasterFarian or PDFRead? There are many options but I am not sure which to adjust to get my PDF files displaying properly. Currently, in RasterFarian I get decent results by just accepting all the defaults (thought I do choose to use half page landscape mode). I would however like to decrease the overlap between the bottom of the top half of the page and the top of the bottom half of the page. I am not sure how to accomplish this.

Incidentally, do the respective authors of RasterFarian and PDFRead have PayPal accounts setup so those users who would like to thank them monetarily for their work can do so? Thanks.

- dtg

Are there any manuals or FAQ for how to adjust settings in RasterFarian or PDFRead? There are many options but I am not sure which to adjust to get my PDF files displaying properly. Currently, in RasterFarian I get decent results by just accepting all the defaults (thought I do choose to use half page landscape mode). I would however like to decrease the overlap between the bottom of the top half of the page and the top of the bottom half of the page. I am not sure how to accomplish this.

Incidentally, do the respective authors of RasterFarian and PDFRead have PayPal accounts setup so those users who would like to thank them monetarily for their work can do so? Thanks.

- dtg Unfortunately, I haven't had time to document the various PDFRead options. Also, I suspect that alex_d considers the various UI prompts in RasterFarian good enough. The thing is, most of the time the defaults give you very good results so there is not much tweaking of options needed, and hence a corresponding lack of documentation about those. For your specific question for PDFRead, you can reduce the overlap by setting the command line option --overlap 10 (or whatever you want). I'll try and see if I can update the website this weekend.

If you do want to say thanks, you can use the "Support this project (https://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=87679)" button on the PDFRead homepage (http://pdfread.sourceforge.net).

For your specific question for PDFRead, you can reduce the overlap by setting the command line option --overlap 10 (or whatever you want).
I think this option is available when selecting option 3 (create quarters) for "Arrange as", but not in option 2 (half pages in landscape). I added "--overlap 5" (and 1, 10, 20, 30) in command line when calling the application, no differences in the output. Only thing "--overlap 5" did was to create the output 5.lrf without asking for the output file in window. So it worked like an "outputfile" option.

Please let me know if I'm using it correctly.
I'd love to be able to minimize the overlap between top and bottom parts when splitting the page into halfs.

Thanks for great application.
David

Hi alex_d,

is there any possibility to run automatic conversion of all files in given folder without manually adding them and without going through settings screens for every file?

Hi,

Got an alert box trying to install: xcopy.exe - Entry Point Not Found

"The procedure entry point ?QueryStream@FSN_FILE@@QAEPAVFILE_STREAM@@W4STREAM ACCESS@@K@Z could not be located in the dynamic link library ulib.dll

Then it doesn't see my .NET 2.0 framework and sends me there to download it.

Any ideas on this one?

-Win2k system
-Athlon 1GHz
-Plenty of HD
-768MB RAM

- Renamed Rasterfarian's xcopy.exe to xcopy.bak

- Copied xcopy.exe from C:\WINNT\System32 to \\RasterFarian 2.5.1\RasterFarian FILES\software

- Installed again, no errors

It seems for those of us bent on staying with older systems, the xcopy bundled is from WinXP and therefore Win2000 hiccups on the "newer" xcopy.

Hope this helps anyone who's having similar problems.

sigh... i try to help some ppl, and then mess up others. anyway, i wouldn't recommend win2k. just turn off themes in winxp and disable some services and it's the same without 2k's rough edges. in any case, you should find ram from another old pc. ram is what makes old pcs useable. right now i'm on a tablet pc with a piii 933 and 512mb. its running an nlite'd (modified) copy of win2k3. works very well, especially with the swap file turned off.

p.s., i'm still working on the gui version. this will also have good batch support and adjustable overlap. don't hold your breath, though.

I'm new (to RAR and RasterFarian and even MobileRead!) but have lurked this week and have grown excited about possibly making my many PDFs readable on my new Sony. I've downloaded the four parts of 2.5.1 beta of RasterFarian, renamed them 1.RAR, 2.RAR, etc. and put them in a folder C:\unrar. I then downloaded UNRARW32.EXE to the same folder and ran it to get UNRAR. I used a command window from WinXP to run UNRAR and typed UNRAR E 1.RAR which proceeded to unpack all four parts into the same folder. But when I then run INSTALL.CMD to install RasterFarian, I get "ERROR. The files necessary to install RasterFarian were not found!" Sorry for my ignorance if I've done something stupid. I'm just anxious to try your intriguing tool. Can you point out my error, please?

why don't youi just download and install winrar from www.rarlabs.com and double click it? You can then extract it with the correct folder structure (which I think was what you missed out when you simply used the unrar command)

Thanks for the fix.

Hi,

Just got me Sony Ereader and tried RasterFarian 2.5 beta. But I got this error message:

...Creating EPS file from PDF page
...Performing autocropping
...Rastering PNG file from EPS file (this step may take several minutes)
NOTE: Some especially complex pages may take a VERY long time (e.g. an hour)
If this seems to be occuring, you may go into the Task Manager
and kill the gswin32c.exe process. This will result in a blank page.
...Running PNG file through image post-processing
'"C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\software\NetPBM\pnmscale.exe"' is not recognize
d as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks a lot.

That depends on the PDF. If the PDF is all text and there are no graphics you want to keep, you can use pdf2html which is part of libprs500. And if there are not too many graphics, you can screen grab and cut them out and put them back into the HTML, format the HTML, and then use html2lrf to make the final LRF.

1. Try reinstalling RasterFarian
2. Try reinstalling it in Root (C:\RasterFarian)
3. Try using PDFRead (http://pdfread.sourceforge.net) if it is a complex document or pdftohtml (http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/) if you don't care too much of the formatting

Hi,

Just got me Sony Ereader and tried RasterFarian 2.5 beta. But I got this error message:

...Creating EPS file from PDF page
...Performing autocropping
...Rastering PNG file from EPS file (this step may take several minutes)
NOTE: Some especially complex pages may take a VERY long time (e.g. an hour)
If this seems to be occuring, you may go into the Task Manager
and kill the gswin32c.exe process. This will result in a blank page.
...Running PNG file through image post-processing
'"C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\software\NetPBM\pnmscale.exe"' is not recognize
d as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Does anyone have a solution?

Thanks a lot.


Do you have that executable in that directory? If not, you've probably not installed completely.

I'd not use the preview thingie if I were you btw. The result is pretty awfull when viewed on a normal monitor. It looks much better on the reader.

1. Try reinstalling RasterFarian
2. Try reinstalling it in Root (C:\RasterFarian)
3. Try using PDFRead (http://pdfread.sourceforge.net) if it is a complex document or pdftohtml (http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/) if you don't care too much of the formatting

Thank you for replying.

I tried reinstalling, but it didn't work.

How do I install it in the Root? There doesn't seem to be a place where I can specify the directory while installing.

I am trying PDFread. Will see how it works out.

Do you have that executable in that directory? If not, you've probably not installed completely.

I'd not use the preview thingie if I were you btw. The result is pretty awfull when viewed on a normal monitor. It looks much better on the reader.

I do have the executable in the directory. What I noticed in the error message is that there are two slashes between "RasterFarian" and "software". In other words, the error message has:

C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\software\NetPBM,

not: C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\software\NetPBM.

Could that be the problem?

I do have the executable in the directory. What I noticed in the error message is that there are two slashes between "RasterFarian" and "software". In other words, the error message has:

C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\\software\NetPBM,

not: C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\software\NetPBM.

Could that be the problem?

No that doesn't matter.

What happens if you copy and run that program? I mean, go to the start menu, chose run, and then copy and paste that string into the optiona nd see if it runs.

No that doesn't matter.

What happens if you copy and run that program? I mean, go to the start menu, chose run, and then copy and paste that string into the optiona nd see if it runs.

I just noticed that I don't have "C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\software\NetPBM\pnmscale.exe". But there is this similarly named executable "C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\software\NetPBM\pamscale.exe".

I copied and ran this program. A cmd window flashed by, but nothing else happened.

So the question now is why I have "pamscale.exe", instead of "pnmscale.exe".

I just noticed that I don't have "C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\software\NetPBM\pnmscale.exe". But there is this similarly named executable "C:\Program Files\RasterFarian\software\NetPBM\pamscale.exe".

I copied and ran this program. A cmd window flashed by, but nothing else happened.

So the question now is why I have "pamscale.exe", instead of "pnmscale.exe".


did you extracted all files correctly? pamscale is different than pnmscale. try reinstalling again

did you extracted all files correctly? pamscale is different than pnmscale. try reinstalling again

I think I know the problem now. I redownloaded everything and extracted the file again. During the extraction, my anti-virus program identified pnmscale as a trojan horse and deleted it.

Just to be sure, so this is a mistake by my anti-virus program, right?

I disabled my antivirus program and re-installed the program. But during the installation, the access to pnmscale.exe was denied. I continued the installation anyway, but got the same error message when I tried to convert a file.

Could anyone explain? It is driving me nuts.

You should remove the existing directory completely first. I don't know why your virus scanner marks it as a virus. My virusscanner says it's safe.

I deleted the old directory and tried again. Didn't work. Access denied. I will try to install in another computer. Thanks a lot for your great help, athlonkmf !

It finally works!

The problem is my anti-virus program. I disabled it during installation. And after installation, put the Raster directory in the whitelist so that it is not scanned.

By the way, the results are great. And thanks all who have helped.

how come I suddenly have the feeling that I become some sort of helpdesk for this program?

:2thumbsup

Bump!

I installed the latest 2.5.1 app OK , got it working after a few errors here and there.. I'm using Windows 2000 and I had to replace the xcopy DLL; and I had to select "1" page on the PDF options.

Nice app, good job!

This application does what it says, but my only gripe is if someone can put a GUI around this Command Line? I thought I had gone back in time to 1985 or something...

F.

guys, I am new...Had a huge and maybe stupid question:

I downloaded, extracted, and installed RasterFarian v2.5, ran once of the configuration, everything seems fine. When I started to do conversion, I got a windows dialogue error: "PDF Library - Evaluation period expired, please contact pdfsupport@pdf-tools.com"...Am I doing anything wrong, what am I suppose to do. If I click ok, my converted lrf will simply be blank.

EDIT: Nevermind, I just found out myself by looking at your "kernel-processing.cmd"

Is there a way to split a page into 3 parts (instead of 2) in RasterFarian? I would love to make the fonts somewhat larger than RasterFarian now produces.

Could someone please write a tutorial for this? I searched all over this forum and can't find one :(

Looks to be a great program - one that will make a huge amount of stuff available for the Reader. But how to get from the 4 files on the May 16 post in this thread to a working version? I have searched for instructions comprehensible to non-geeks & find only a few bleats like mine requesting tutorials. Even the unpacking of the 4? zipped files is a bit strange & what emerges for me is a program that seems to be a 2.14 version that outputs blank pages. Of course the geeks will be shaking their heads in disbelief at my ignorance, but I want to spend time driving the car rather than assembling it.

There was no way to tell [ImageMagick] "no, you stupid crap, the sony reader can only use THESE four colors."
Oh, but there is a way, just look at the -map option (though the dithering is not as good as NetPBMs). Honestly, I think the ImageMagick documentation is quite alright.

guys, I am new...Had a huge and maybe stupid question:

I downloaded, extracted, and installed RasterFarian v2.5, ran once of the configuration, everything seems fine. When I started to do conversion, I got a windows dialogue error: "PDF Library - Evaluation period expired, please contact pdfsupport@pdf-tools.com"...Am I doing anything wrong, what am I suppose to do. If I click ok, my converted lrf will simply be blank.

select "1" page on the PDF page number options 1-32....

F.

Sorry to be so dense, but why are the RasterFarian files labeled part1, part2, and so on? Do I need to unzip and install all of the parts? Only one of them? I'd be grateful for any help.

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Jack Lyon
The Editorium
http://www.editorium.com

Sorry to be so dense, but why are the RasterFarian files labeled part1, part2, and so on? Do I need to unzip and install all of the parts? Only one of them? I'd be grateful for any help.

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Jack Lyon
The Editorium
http://www.editorium.com
They are compressed using RAR format due to the size limitation on attachments. Go get a copy of WinRAR and you can decompress. Just put all the files in the same directory and select the first part to uncompress and it will uncompress from them all.

I got my prs-500 because the guy at the store said it would be perfect for my extensive pdf collection at home. Every one who will be reading this right now knows exactly how I felt then when I got it home fired it up and opened my first pdf book. After downloading this my world is right again. You have made me a happy man! In my sad little world that makes you a god of gadgetry. Thank you so very much!

Nick Neary

I don't know if you have run into this before or not but I love the free magazines at http://www.qmags.com they download in pdf format but rasterfarian 2.5.1 will not convert them. I will attach one to this post not to worry though as far as copyright these are FREE mags. When i am at the preview screen it wants to know which page I want to preview 1-0 and if I skip when it does the conversion it outputs one blank page. Thanks in advanced!

I don't know if you have run into this before or not but I love the free magazines at http://www.qmags.com they download in pdf format but rasterfarian 2.5.1 will not convert them. I will attach one to this post not to worry though as far as copyright these are FREE mags. When i am at the preview screen it wants to know which page I want to preview 1-0 and if I skip when it does the conversion it outputs one blank page. Thanks in advanced!
The reason it doesn't work with that PDF is because that PDF is secured. And you cannot edit a secured PDF.

I got my prs-500 because the guy at the store said it would be perfect for my extensive pdf collection at home. Every one who will be reading this right now knows exactly how I felt then when I got it home fired it up and opened my first pdf book. After downloading this my world is right again. You have made me a happy man! In my sad little world that makes you a god of gadgetry. Thank you so very much!

Nick Neary
wow :-[, thanks

as for protected magazines... the SciAm magazines i subscribe to also have protection and I designed rasterfarian to bypass it. I think your error is due to something else. oh well, rasterfarian is a pos at heart. I suggest you also try PDFRead. It uses the same techniques (*caugh**caugh*) but with different means. It's not that great either, though.

Everyone who is using the current version of this product needs to make a choice. Alex is using a commercial tool as part of the conversion process, a tool which has not been paid for (thus the "trial expired" message) and cannot be distributed as part of a product even if it WAS paid for.

I don't want to sound like I don't appreciate the effort that Alex has put into producing this. However, distribution of a trial version of a commercial tool like this is just wrong, and Alex is quite aware of what he has done. I'm not going to reproduce his reply here, but I will say that I have no intention of using this tool while it violates the license of pdf-tools (the company that makes pdcat.exe).

If you are using Rasterfarian, then you need to decide whether you want to encourage this kind of behavior. I certainly won't. I love my reader but I'm not going to break the law to read PDFs on it.

I'm sure there are going to be some people who insult me for taking this position, or tell me "Who is it hurting?" or some other justification. And you are certainly within your right to do so. Remember, though, that people go to jail or pay fines for distributing illegal copies of software and I have no intention of doing either one of those things. I also don't want to see MobileRead.com get into trouble for a user using their site to distribute an illegal copy of a program.


Mark

However, distribution of a trial version of a commercial tool like this is just wrong,
You mean wrong like kicking a puppy is just wrong? and how cheating on your wife is just wrong? Morality is a tricky thing, but many people, you included, have a tendency to think that if someone wrote it down on paper, then it must be just wrong. You're the kind of guy who tell kids they're not playing their boardgame by the rules.

My sense of morality understands that laws are imperfect. You can't write a legislation that says, for example, "well, if a guy honestly didn't know he was breaking the law then you let him off." It's logistics, practicalities. You don't know who's lying. So you write a law that says, "professed ignorance is always ignored" and send everyone to jail. There's many other such examples too. It's understandable. But only an idiot thinks it's Right or ideal.

So, if you are lawyer representing pdf-tools.com, or a judge, then I could see why you insist on sticking to the letter. But if you're just a guy, then you have a really misplaced sense of morality in thinking that actions which definately (not just sort of) don't hurt anyone are nevertheless Wrong in the ethical sense. You're just not thinking clearly.


p.s. for those who'd like the background: rasterfarian makes use of pdinfo.exe to read the bookmarks in a pdf. It is the only commandline tool that i've found after extensive searching that does this simple task. pdinfo.exe is one of about a dozen executables that are packaged as a single product by pdf-tools.com called "command-line tools." This simple package retails for $360 per user, obviously targeted at businesses who could try to justify something like this (and the high cost arises not from how difficult it is to create the product but rather the dynamics of how much businesses would pay).

Now I'm not going to criticize how pdf-tools would like to make money, or our as-yet imperfect capitalism for not being empowered by fluid competition so that the price of things becomes their cost. That doesn't matter right now. Rather, it's pretty obvious that redistributing this tiny subset of a product that is targeted at a completely different market has caused pdf-tools.com no damages (and I say that with precision). On the flipside, this redistribution has considerably enhanced the RasterFarian tool that was created and is distributed for free for no reason other than to aid others.

If the golden rule of morality is that "the Right is that which increases the sum of the Good in the world relative to its Ills," then pretty clearly what i've done here is good. The fact that the law can't be written to be so nuanced is understandable. Yet people who think that what's been written down is infallible, are not.

This is what I mean when I say your morality is misplaced.

Now that your actions have caused RasterFarian to no longer be offered for download, you have clearly done a significant number of people harm. What you've done is, obviously, legal. But was it ethical?

Unfortunately, it is also in my legal power to forbid you from using RasterFarian. Do I consider this ethical? Certainly not. It is an empty, unfair act meant to hurt. It's also silly that I've been given the power to boss you around in this way. But it's legal. Now I wonder, would you obey or be a hypocrite?

Morality issues aside, in the US, distributing someone else's copyrite work without their express consent is illegal. Mobileread does not want to be held liable for that, which is why it will not be available on this site.

Alex you could try opening a ticket asking for that feature at http://podofo.sourceforge.net/. It's under active development, so you may get lucky.

Simple solution. Don't distribute the pdf-tools with the package, and point the user to the pdf-tools.com website, telling them how to download the trial version and how to install the files.

RasterFarian will still work the way it is. If the user decides to buy the tool, it's his/her own choice.

Alex you could try opening a ticket asking for that feature at http://podofo.sourceforge.net/. It's under active development, so you may get lucky.

If I wrote something for the public, which I've spent weeks for it. And get this kind of thanks, I'll just stop spending my time for ungrateful souls.

If I wrote something for the public, which I've spent weeks for it. And get this kind of thanks, I'll just stop spending my time for ungrateful souls.

I'd find a way to modify it so that it isn't breaking any laws... :knife:

Simple solution. Don't distribute the pdf-tools with the package, and point the user to the pdf-tools.com website, telling them how to download the trial version and how to install the files.

RasterFarian will still work the way it is. If the user decides to buy the tool, it's his/her own choice.
A few people have mentioned that this program does expire. I think a solution needs to be found to fix that. Yes, I know we can pay for this program and it won't then expire and all will work. But the demo being used does expire and will render things not very usable.

A few people have mentioned that this program does expire. I think a solution needs to be found to fix that. Yes, I know we can pay for this program and it won't then expire and all will work. But the demo being used does expire and will render things not very usable.

Then it's up to the user to find a solution. If alex is not obligated to find another option. (i'm sure there are other tools who can be used. Maybe even a .NET project with pdf-classes, like the one I used for manga2ebook)

If I wrote something for the public, which I've spent weeks for it. And get this kind of thanks, I'll just stop spending my time for ungrateful souls.

That's not thanks, that's helpful advice, a whole different class from thanks.

Since I'm the one who brought this whole mess out in the open, I feel obligated to respond to this posting.

You mean wrong like kicking a puppy is just wrong? and how cheating on your wife is just wrong? Morality is a tricky thing, but many people, you included, have a tendency to think that if someone wrote it down on paper, then it must be just wrong. You're the kind of guy who tell kids they're not playing their boardgame by the rules.

This has nothing to do with morality. As I said before, my intention is to prevent MobileRead from getting their pants sued off. I thought long and hard before I wrote that message and before I wrote to you personally. Kicking a puppy or cheating on your wife are also wrong, but they don't get you sued by a software company.

My sense of morality understands that laws are imperfect. You can't write a legislation that says, for example, "well, if a guy honestly didn't know he was breaking the law then you let him off." It's logistics, practicalities. You don't know who's lying. So you write a law that says, "professed ignorance is always ignored" and send everyone to jail. There's many other such examples too. It's understandable. But only an idiot thinks it's Right or ideal.

Again, this has nothing to do with morality, Alex.

So, if you are lawyer representing pdf-tools.com, or a judge, then I could see why you insist on sticking to the letter. But if you're just a guy, then you have a really misplaced sense of morality in thinking that actions which definately (not just sort of) don't hurt anyone are nevertheless Wrong in the ethical sense. You're just not thinking clearly.

Actually, you are quite incorrect here. I may be "just a guy," but I am also a person who develops software for a living and for a hobby. I wouldn't want to see my company's work distributed for free just because someone didn't want to pay for it. If it's open-source, that's a different story. The problem with your argument is that you are saying "the end justifies the means".

p.s. for those who'd like the background: rasterfarian makes use of pdinfo.exe to read the bookmarks in a pdf. It is the only commandline tool that i've found after extensive searching that does this simple task. pdinfo.exe is one of about a dozen executables that are packaged as a single product by pdf-tools.com called "command-line tools." This simple package retails for $360 per user, obviously targeted at businesses who could try to justify something like this (and the high cost arises not from how difficult it is to create the product but rather the dynamics of how much businesses would pay).

Actually, the version of RasterFarian I saw uses pdcat.exe (from pdf-tools) and xcopy.exe (from Windows itself). You can argue all day that $360 for 12 tools is too much and that it's not worth it for you to invest the time to write an equivalent tool when pdf-tools is really charging only $30 (360/12) for this... but that won't wash. It was obviously worth it to them to invest the time.

Now I'm not going to criticize how pdf-tools would like to make money, or our as-yet imperfect capitalism for not being empowered by fluid competition so that the price of things becomes their cost. That doesn't matter right now. Rather, it's pretty obvious that redistributing this tiny subset of a product that is targeted at a completely different market has caused pdf-tools.com no damages (and I say that with precision). On the flipside, this redistribution has considerably enhanced the RasterFarian tool that was created and is distributed for free for no reason other than to aid others.

Wow... ok, there is so much wrong with that paragraph... dude, that is NOT your decision to make. You can't say "I'm using this tool in a completely different market, and I'm not hurting pdf-tools by doing this" as a justification. Again, you are saying "the ends justify the means".


If the golden rule of morality is that "the Right is that which increases the sum of the Good in the world relative to its Ills," then pretty clearly what i've done here is good. The fact that the law can't be written to be so nuanced is understandable. Yet people who think that what's been written down is infallible, are not.

This is what I mean when I say your morality is misplaced.

This isn't a "good" vs "bad" argument. What you did could get MobileRead into trouble, and I've found this place to be a wonderful source of information. I took the initial step of writing to you so that I could get some clarification on this. You responded with a less-than-pleasant message basically telling me to go to hell.

Now that your actions have caused RasterFarian to no longer be offered for download, you have clearly done a significant number of people harm. What you've done is, obviously, legal. But was it ethical?

Compare what I've done to having MobileRead being shut down by a lawsuit because of YOUR actions. Now tell me I've done more harm than you.

Unfortunately, it is also in my legal power to forbid you from using RasterFarian. Do I consider this ethical? Certainly not. It is an empty, unfair act meant to hurt. It's also silly that I've been given the power to boss you around in this way. But it's legal. Now I wonder, would you obey or be a hypocrite?

And you miss the point... I have no intention of using your tool when it's got software you aren't licensed to distribute embedded in it. And you have every right to tell me not to use your software. The fact that you are responding in this way shows that you don't give a crap about doing the right thing. You just want to show everyone how moral you are. Good for you.

Mark

Mark,

You've done absolutely the right thing here. This type of thing could get MobileRead shut down in an instant. As a MobileRead Editor, I would personally and publically like to thank you for bringing this to our attention in the way that you did, and to say how bad I feel about the abuse that has come your way as a result. You have absolutely nothing to apologise to anyone for - we all owe you a debt of gratitude.

How can I download the 2.5beta? I saw this notice before the attachements:
"Attachments Pending Approval"

And the attachments are not clickable.

Thanks,
- Mark

All attachments in this thread have been "unapproved" and can no longer be downloaded.

OK. I see. Sorry I didn't follow the thread to the end and didn't see all the arguments. Hopefully someday the package can be released without the pdf tools. I am a licensed pdf tools user and can use RasterFarian over it.

Simple solution. Don't distribute the pdf-tools with the package, and point the user to the pdf-tools.com website, telling them how to download the trial version and how to install the files.

Beside finding an open-source alternative, this is also one of the ideas I had and suggested to alex_d. alex, I am still waiting for your response :o

I am wondering if I can download rasterfarian 2.5?
There is no link on the forum.
Could you direct me?

We've disabled the downloads because we discovered that the current package includes an expired trial version of commercial software, and MobileRead makes it a point to avoid knowingly distributing such things.

You can find details starting in post #120 (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=90916#post90916) (and continuing through post #135).

medavidson, this certainly was about your morality. you're just jumping on the "i just wanted to keep mobileread safe" reason because it's the only one thats justifiable. However, it's not a good one. If anyone whose business it actually was to care about this thing had a problem, they would've contacted mobileread same as you. Why don't you run off now and go identify some verbatim quoted press releases? keep mobileread safe!


anyway, pdinfo's job is pretty simple. it just prints out the page count and bookmarks. writing a program that does this with a pdf library should be trivial. this is one reason why this issue re pdinfo is damn stupid in the first place. oh no... mobileread's hosting wAreZ. come here to download the most important piece of a $350 pdf package... the binary that just prints out page numbers!

anyone care to recommend a good library? preferably for .net?

Hi Alex,

I am not an expert, but here are a few open-source PDF libraries/tools I found through googling:


ReportLab Toolkit (http://www.reportlab.org/rl_toolkit.html)
Pdftk (http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/)
PDFtools (http://www.bwalle.de/index.shtml?programme.shtml) (download here (http://freenet-homepage.de/kohm/markus/PDFTools.tar.gz), here (http://www.bwalle.de/programme/pdfconcat.zip) and here (http://www.bwalle.de/programme/psmerge.zip) and here (http://www.bwalle.de/programme/psmergepdf.zip))
Python pdftools (http://www.boddie.org.uk/david/Projects/Python/pdftools/)
Python pdffile (http://www.adaptive-enterprises.com.au/~d/software/pdffile/)


Of course there is always the option to point users to the demo download page of pdf-tools should we continue to use the existing program modules (pdcat, pdinfo) :shy:.

medavidson, this certainly was about your morality. you're just jumping on the "i just wanted to keep mobileread safe" reason because it's the only one thats justifiable. However, it's not a good one. If anyone whose business it actually was to care about this thing had a problem, they would've contacted mobileread same as you. Why don't you run off now and go identify some verbatim quoted press releases? keep mobileread safe!


anyway, pdinfo's job is pretty simple. it just prints out the page count and bookmarks. writing a program that does this with a pdf library should be trivial. this is one reason why this issue re pdinfo is damn stupid in the first place. oh no... mobileread's hosting wAreZ. come here to download the most important piece of a $350 pdf package... the binary that just prints out page numbers!

anyone care to recommend a good library? preferably for .net?

Alex,

PLEASE stop trying to shift the blame for your actions onto Mark. He has done absolutely nothing wrong; it is you who are breaking the law.

MobileRead is a "legit" site; we, as MR Editors, most definitely do care about issues of this nature. The company which hosts this web site has, in the past, shown themselves willing to shut down sites at the merest mention of copyright infringement. We have got to take these matter very seriously indeed.

You may believe that these matters are unimportant - that's fine; you're free to think that - but we take these matters seriously and we encourage all MR members to report possible copyright infringement issues to us.

We expect all MobileRead members to maintain certain standards of politeness and decorum towards one another. Abuse of members of this board will not be tolerated. You will be banned from this board if you continue this abusive and aggressive behaviour towards Mark or anyone else.

Please don't ask people to send you illegal software, jaffer.

Thank you,

Could you please stop spamming? Alternatives to RasterFarian would be PDFRead (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10558) and pdflrf (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13135).

EDIT: Oops, Harry was faster ...

Ok sorry. Pdfread takes forever and makes images look horrible and pdf2lrf splits off the bottom sliver of pages and puts them at the top of a new page and leaves the rest blank. Rasterfarian just treated me very well.

pdf2lrf splits off the bottom sliver of pages and puts them at the top of a new page and leaves the rest blankIt's possible to disable that feature. I don't know about the GUI (haven't tested it yet), but with the command line the option would be:
-n, --nosplitpage Do not split pages across images (default=off)

I dunno I am using the gui version, and when I take the check mark out of split pages it still does it. If it weren't for this simple little thing I would love the program.

I dunno I am using the gui version, and when I take the check mark out of split pages it still does it. If it weren't for this simple little thing I would love the program.
Ive used it and I've set it not to split pages and it works fine. You also need to turn off Split Pages, Smart Cut, and Run Pages.

Ive used it and I've set it not to split pages and it works fine. You also need to turn off Split Pages, Smart Cut, and Run Pages.

Strangely when I run it with these options I get a document that has several pages that are just a tiny image at the top left smaller than a postage stamp with the rest of the page all shrunk into this small image where as the rest of the pages are fine out of a 148pg document there are probably 30-40 pages that turned out like that. :smack:

Strangely when I run it with these options I get a document that has several pages that are just a tiny image at the top left smaller than a postage stamp with the rest of the page all shrunk into this small image where as the rest of the pages are fine out of a 148pg document there are probably 30-40 pages that turned out like that. :smack:
Use the options to cut the pages and see what happens. What I am thinking is that there is junk on the very outside of the pages that cause them to not be able to have the margins cut enough. It sounds like a very poorly created PDF.

Strangely when I run it with these options I get a document that has several pages that are just a tiny image at the top left smaller than a postage stamp with the rest of the page all shrunk into this small image where as the rest of the pages are fine out of a 148pg document there are probably 30-40 pages that turned out like that. :smack:

I get this if I uncheck the "crop" option. Try with "crop", everything else unchecked.

As an alternative, I use "Just another Printer", free program that does a similar thing (and even keeps the ToC if your pdf has it). Links are in the first post of http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5366.

hello,

Why I could not download the files?

hello,

Why I could not download the files?

Try here instead: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13135

hello,

Why I could not download the files?
If you've read the recent posts, you'll find out that a trial (no expired) program was used in the making of this. The moderators decided that since no permission to bundle the trial software was given, to remove the attachment.

Yes that is true that there isn't any area at the sides of the document to crop. As far as the quality of the PDF it is superb probably because it is from a magazine company i have a digital subscription to the pdf is not however protected. Grrrr so frustrating rasterfarian handled these perfectly lol. oh well

If you can send me a sample page that exhibits this problem, I can look into this.

I would be happy to but it is playboy digital edition magazine I don't want to make any one angry or get banned for posting it.

Here are the sample pages you asked for first 14 pages no nudity that I can see in any of the pages I hope thats acceptable. PB0807-1.lrf is what happens when I have only crops sides checked as suggested. PB0807-2.lrf is what happens when I leave the settings at default for portrait.

Only reason I am whining so much about this is when I had rasterfarian it converted these perfectly and I found I rather enjoyed reading (yes I actually like to read the articles) it on my ereader so I signed up for a 1 year subscription. Now it is all messed up lol.

Please post the sample pages as pdf.

ok let me figure out how to strip out the first 14 pages out of the pdf file with acrobat pro do you know how?

ok let me figure out how to strip out the first 14 pages out of the pdf file with acrobat pro do you know how?Look under the Document menu, you should find what you need there (I'm not sure if you want the first 14 pages or if you want pages 15 through something else, or I'd try to be more specific :shrug:).

yeah i want to just keep the first 14 pages sorry

In that case you can go to page 15 and choose delete pages in the Document menu, or you can do Extract Pages, either one should get you what you need. But those options aren't there in the Acrobat Reader app, only in the full Acrobat installation ....

Here are the sample pages in pdf format. I had to zip them to get it under 5mb but it is pdf inside. Thanks again I really appreciate you taking a look.

If you've read the recent posts, you'll find out that a trial (no expired) program was used in the making of this. The moderators decided that since no permission to bundle the trial software was given, to remove the attachment.
Has the author or anyone tried to contact the trial software's author? They will often offer free software for freeware or open-source projects.

Ralph

Unfortunately, rasterfarian gives the best results for image-based pdf's:
PDFlrf is good too, but the filesize is double the size of a rasterfarian-file, and also lacks contrast.

Samples here:
http://hightech.afmag.net/pdf-rasterizers-for-the-sony-reader-a-review-on-rasterfarian-pdfread-and-pdflrf.html

Thanks for making a comparison. I didn't add the sharpness filter to pdflrf - but it looks like that does make a difference