I did some experiments with the PDF email conversion Amazon offers with the Kindle... I gotta say, I was very impressed.

I'm pretty good at OCR and scanning, but I had a few texts (old encyclopedias) that had two columns, lots of pictures and a massive page count (700 pgs).

Well, I tried a number of programs to pull out a good OCR scan. OmniPage, Adobe Acrobat, and the AbbyReader that came with my OpticBook. All were more or less complete failures.

Well, I mailed the files to myself... a few minutes later the volumes appeared on my Kindle - just about perfect. Sure, no table of contents and the first 20 pages were a mess of legalese, names, indexes, etc... But the text itself was full and intact. And since this is something I'll be searching and not reading casually, it's just wonderful.

I gotta say... very impressed. The inline pictures even came out pretty nice - limited, of course, by the poor picture quality on the Kindle.

It uses (so it appears) the same PDF conversion tool that's in MobiPocket Creator, so you may find it easier to use that. Simply open the PDF in Mobi Creator.

yeah, but it doesn't format certain things right. I read a lot of scripts, and there are a lot of pages like this:

BOB Hey, Sally.
SALLY What up, Bob. Nice Kindle you got there.
BOB Yeah - except for the whole DRM thing.

When emailed into my Kindle or transferred using MobiCreator (I tried both), it would mess up the formatting terribly, so I would end up with:

BOB Hey, Sally.SALLY What up, Bob. Nice Kindle you got
there. BOB Yeah - except for the whole DRM thing.

:-( Times like this that I wish it would just offer a straight-up PDF-reader option that shows the page as an image.

Yeah, I didn't realize it was the mobicreator software... I've used everything but it for PDF!

It's certainly not perfect, but I was surprised by how well it handled some things.

yeah, but it doesn't format certain things right. I read a lot of scripts, and there are a lot of pages like this:

BOB Hey, Sally.
SALLY What up, Bob. Nice Kindle you got there.
BOB Yeah - except for the whole DRM thing.

When emailed into my Kindle or transferred using MobiCreator (I tried both), it would mess up the formatting terribly, so I would end up with:

BOB Hey, Sally.SALLY What up, Bob. Nice Kindle you got
there. BOB Yeah - except for the whole DRM thing.

:-( Times like this that I wish it would just offer a straight-up PDF-reader option that shows the page as an image.

Exactly what MobiPocket Creator has done to a few pdfs I tried to convert with it. It messes up paragrphs. Way too much for my liking.

I tried Mobipocket Creator for the free PDF eBook from TOR. Way to mussed up with the paragraphs for my liking.

I tried Mobipocket Creator for the free PDF eBook from TOR. Way to mussed up with the paragraphs for my liking.

That's the "fault" of the PDF format, rather than the tool. A PDF file contains no information about paragraphs, lines, or even words - it just has information about individual letters, along the lines of "draw a letter 'a' at such-and-such a position on the page". Given such a paucity of information, the conversion tools do a pretty good job!

I compared the Amazon converted PDF of Mistborn to the one generated by MobiCreator. they were both full of errors, messed up paragraphs, run on words, and not translating words broken up at the end of the line.

*But* the Amazon version had far fewer errors even though it was still pretty bad.

Yeah, it's never going to be perfect - but I was pleasantly surprised.

I've been sending myself academic journal articles, so far it's about 1 in 20 that have problems.

Amazon's conversion works quite well, not perfect but we are happy with it

Well, I tried a number of programs to pull out a good OCR scan. OmniPage, Adobe Acrobat, and the AbbyReader that came with my OpticBook. All were more or less complete failures.

Well, I mailed the files to myself... a few minutes later the volumes appeared on my Kindle - just about perfect.

The Kindle does OCR conversion with pictures?

The Kindle does OCR conversion with pictures?

that was a jump that was not in the original. I can't imagine that the conversion software on Amazon's web site uses OCR and Kindle doesn't even do conversion.

Dale

The Kindle does OCR conversion with pictures? The Kindle conversion service does not do OCR. For one approach to PDFs of scanned images see Converting your PDF files to Kindle using PDF2LRF (Better than Amazon's conversion) (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18968).