Here are some initial htmldoc settings that I find give reasonable results for PDF files on the Sony:

--fontsize 18
--left 2mm --right 2mm --top 2mm --bottom 2mm
--gray
--size 6.5x8in

If others improve on them please post here!

I've settled on these settings for now. I find the Helvetica font more readable than Ariel or Times, which look a bit washed out.

--textfont Helvetica
--fontsize 18
--left 1mm --right 1mm --top 1mm --bottom 1mm
--gray
--size 6.5x8in
--header ...
--footer ...
--textcolor black

Are these settings used to alter the format of pdf files to fit the reader?

If so, how/where are the settings applied to a pdf file?

Are these settings used to alter the format of pdf files to fit the reader?

If so, how/where are the settings applied to a pdf file?

No, these were used to convert HTML documents into PDFs. I'm mostly interested in technical stuff that I get online, not fiction, which I haven't had time for since becoming a parent and working at Microsoft for the past five years (I did have a life once, and maybe one day I will again).

Anyway, the key thing I believe is the use of Helvetica fonts. I don't know the correct typographic terms but you want to avoid fonts that have any form of decorative noise, like horizontal parts at the top or bottom of lower-case Ls, for example. Also fonts that have different thicknesses depending on the slope of lines. Instead you want simple fonts with uniform thickness. That way the effect is very black and readable, vs gray.

... the key thing I believe is the use of Helvetica fonts. I don't know the correct typographic terms but you want to avoid fonts that have any form of decorative noise, like horizontal parts at the top or bottom of lower-case Ls, for example. Also fonts that have different thicknesses depending on the slope of lines. Instead you want simple fonts with uniform thickness. That way the effect is very black and readable, vs gray.

Geekraver,

Am I correct in concluding that Helvetica fonts are commercial only; you have to buy them? If so, would you (or someone) be willing to post an image of a book/document on the Reader with this font? I'd love to see how effective it is before I considering buying the font.

I found a font that About.com says is similar to Helvetica bold. Not sure if that makes it too thick, however. It's called Coolvetica, and can be found here:
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/fonts/tx/uc_coolvetica.htm

TIA

Geekraver,

Am I correct in concluding that Helvetica fonts are commercial only; you have to buy them? If so, would you (or someone) be willing to post an image of a book/document on the Reader with this font? I'd love to see how effective it is before I considering buying the font.

I found a font that About.com says is similar to Helvetica bold. Not sure if that makes it too thick, however. It's called Coolvetica, and can be found here:
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/fonts/tx/uc_coolvetica.htm

TIA

I'm just using the Helvetica setting in HTMLDoc; presumably Helvetica is built in to the PDF viewer, so if you're using PDFs I don't understand why you would need to buy the font.

Anyway, I'll try post a pic soon.

I am having a terrible time making an html readable on the Sony reader. I tried a) using PDF Creator on my Adobe Acrobat 7.0. I modified the settings, etc., but the font is not very dark and it's not a serif font like I would like. :(

I then copied the file to RTF and change the font to Georgia with 12 pt and that doesn't look very good either. :(

Here's a sample of one of my htmldoc formatted books. Sorry for the photo quality; the LCD on my camera is busted which makes taking photos a challenge as I never know what the settings are. But as you can see its very readable; any blur is the fault of the camera and me, not the reader.

Thanks, geekraver. This is very nice, indeed. I created a version of Wuthering Heights using BookDesigner with Verdana font size 18. It is quite readable, too, but I want to try the Helvetica font. I'll post a pic of my efforts later this evening.

I've just compiled HTMLDOC under Windows/Cygwin, which was as simple as it gets. Going to try and generate some docs tonight.

I then copied the file to RTF and change the font to Georgia with 12 pt and that doesn't look very good either. :(I'm finding that I need a minimum 16pt font (I use arial) for an RTF to be comforatbly readable. :shrug:

Here is an example of what you can do with cygwin, wget and hmtldoc :)

Steps 1 & 2 are only for Windows users

1. Get Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/)
2. Select and install GCC and WGET options
3. Download htmldoc sources (http://www.htmldoc.org/)
4. If you plan to convert Russian html pages, you will need to download additional fonts (http://www.htmldoc.org/newsgroups.php?s1+ghtmldoc.general+v1+T+Qcyrillic) .
5. Compile and install htmldoc

You will have to experiment with different pages and parameters. HTMLDOC seems to be quite picky about html, but it gives you some nice options.

Lets take Outbrash (http://www.outblush.com/women/home/)

Download the html first
wget -O outbrash.html http://www.outblush.com/women/home/

Now convert it to PDF
$ htmldoc --webpage --gray --fontsize 14 --textfont helvetica --header . --footer . --left 2mm --right 2mm --top 5mm --bottom 5mm --size 5.24x6.69in -f outbrash.pdf outbrash.html

Why are you using a page size much bigger than the reader.Isn`t it optimal to aim for exactly the size of the screen?

Chris,

I took page size from Sony Reader manual. So far it works pretty good for all my conversions.

Chris,

I took page size from Sony Reader manual. So far it works pretty good for all my conversions.

hmm.. in the pictures the actual size seems to be ~122x90mm. Might be worth trying for comparison.

I wish Sony would give out this sort of information. This and the directory structure problem shows that they don`t really care about third party non DRM content

There is a Windows binary of htmldoc available, the one I downloaded was at:

http://users.tpg.com.au/naffall/htmldoc.html

The actual website (which contains the documentation and source, but no binaries) is at:

http://www.htmldoc.org/

I've been playing with it for a couple of hours, and the pdf's I've created look excellent on the reader (very readable).

So far I'm using the following settings, I'm grouping the settings as you would see them in the graphical version of HTMLDOC, everything not mentioned I left at the default:

Output Tab
-Output Options: Greyscale

Page Tab
Page Size: 5.24x6.69in
Margins (for Top/Left/Right/Bottom): 1mm

Fonts
Base Font Size: 16.0
Line Spacing: 1.0
Body Typeface: Helvetica
Heading Typeface: Helvetica
Options: Deselected Embed Fonts (this way it will used the fonts built in to the reader)

PDF
PDF Version: 1.4
Page Mode: Document
Page Layout: Single

Options
Browser Width: 800 (I actually used 600 for a bunch of the sites that I've converted but, some sites don't seem to work with anything smaller than 800).

Once you get all of the settings in there (and setup it up to convert a webpage). You can save the config file. It saves in a .book format.

Once I did that, I setup a simple batch file to convert pdf's for a couple of websites that I like to read. Of course you could just use the graphical tool (hit the generate button), but I'm probably going to be converting a bunch of sites every morning, so using the graphical tool would be a bit tedious.

You can use the following command in a batch file:

htmldoc.exe --quiet --batch YourBookNameHere.book -f Whatever.pdf

All in all I'm very impressed at the quality of the resulting PDF's. They look excellent on the Sony Reader.

Here are the results of my having used BookDesigner and the Verdana font (size 18) with 2" margins all around to format "Wuthering Heights" for the Sony Reader.

Good tutorial!

I noticed that the spacing for some letters is slightly wrong, though. For instance,

neighbo ur
remo ved
di vide
the ir
shelte red

etc.

I've been testing htmldoc for my ebook conversion needs for the Sony Reader. Most books I convert are from Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) which these days tend to use a lot of CSS (and nice pretty pictures :D ), unfortunately htmldoc has limited support in the latest v1.9 for CSS - unless I haven't configured it properly. They still convert well but much of the formatting like centring is missing.

Apart from that it works great on all other HTML content and text based Gutenberg ebooks convert great after processed through GutenMark (http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark/)

I can't find v1.9 binaries so compiled it using Cygwin.

I noticed that the spacing for some letters is slightly wrong, though. For instance,

neighbo ur
remo ved
di vide
the ir
shelte red

etc.

Yes, I noticed that too. BookDesigner is really easy, but I wonder if this is one drawback. I'll have to try other texts to see.