I have been trying to make content for the Sony Reader and have
become a little discouraged. It seems that the Reader does not
support rtf very well - see the post by Libreguy

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/librie/message/2832

and the discussion in the thread

Does the Reader support ebooks in Russian or Greek?

In my hands rtf files are little better than text files - The
only advantage I can see is that rtf files recognize a hard
page break -

My interest has been in scanned books presented as PDB's.
Even if they are prepared in a size to fit the Reader they
do not display very well.

To get some files to try I typed in a short story from one of
my scanned books - a story by the Canadian humorist Stephen
Leacock (out of copyright in the US). I typed into Word for Windows
preceding each paragraph with 3 spaces and ending each paragraph
with the enter button. I then set the page size to 3.5 x 4.5 inches,
added a header, two pictures, and printed it via the Adobe Acrobat
printer. Adobe's web site gives instructions on how to do this.
A nice PDB was produced. However it does not scale and one has
to make it a good size for reading - something that will not suit
all.

Saving the file as rtf and displaying it on the Reader loses
the headers, pictures, font, everything. It displays almost exactly
like the text file.

I've attached the original scanned PDB (4x6 inches), the PDB from Word
printed with Adobe Acrobat, and the text file.

Files are: text To_Nature_and_Back_Again.txt 16.5 K
scanned PDB To_Nature_and_Back_Again_Scanned.pdb 769 K
and PDB from Word To_Nature_and_Back_Again_Word 152 K

I'm hoping someone can make a better rtf file from the text or can tell
me how to do so. I would like headers at least and some variation in font size.
Even so I'm reluctant to go to OCR as I want to preserve the look and
feel of these old books.

I've had pretty good luck with some public domain .rtf files by using the following settings in Word:

- Remove all carriage returns except those at the end of paragraphs using your favorite software or Word macro.
- Set the Word page size: 3.54 x 4.85 inches (from an earlier post - thanks!) from the "Page Setup" menu.
- Set all margins and header/footer to as close to zero as you can
- Put the cursor in the main body of the text and see how many times you need to hit the "font size up" button (a bold "A" with an up pointing triangle) to get it to around 15 points, then set it back.
- Select all the text and click the "font size up" button the number of times you determined. This round-about approach will also proportionately upsize headings, etc
- Update the File, Properties setting to the correct title/author
- Save the file and import it to the reader via the Sony Connect software.

That process gave me a type size about the same as that in the sample books and it resizes/reflows properly.

I found that it wasn't necessary to mess with the page set up or header/footer, as the Reader just pares such things off.

If you want to preserve inline pix, headers & other such formatting, I suggest making a PDF, the size suggestions are around here somewhere, I don't remember them off-hand, but they looked really good on the Reader. Preserved all that "extra" formatting. :)