For Science

[sfrey]

Hi folks, I'm a grad student in math and computer science, and I'm looking forward to a heavy load of journal articles and textbooks. It seems prudent to get a reader make the load (at least literally) lighter.

I've done my research (including the similar post:https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17106) so I understand/accept the whole story with PDFs, but I think my standards are lower than those of the other guy.

I would be willing to convert my files to suit an ebook reader. The questions then become:

*Which tools are best suited to converting scientific articles (TEX/PDF, think figures and equations, I'm okay with compromised images).? If I'm converting from TEX/PDF, HTML is the best destination format, right?

*Do all readers do a satisfactory job of rendering HTML (for my purposes, like equations and references and all that)? The ones I'm looking most closely at are Cybook, the super spare/cheap EBookwise or a used Iliad.

*And zooming out, can I hear from folks who have tried out this workflow from journal through conversion to reader. Does it end up being automatable enough and readable enough to be worth your trouble? How much overhead and hassle am i looking at?

Thanks
-seth

[JSWolf]

The current best device as far as eink based devices go is the iRex iLiad with an 8" screen and good PDF viewing software available.

[astrodad]

I say go buy a cheap tablet computer and save yourself the headache of working with technical materials on en e-ink screen. I tried to read a Python programming guide on my Reader and it was terrible.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by sfrey

I would be willing to convert my files to suit an ebook reader. The questions then become:

*Which tools are best suited to converting scientific articles (TEX/PDF, think figures and equations, I'm okay with compromised images).? If I'm converting from TEX/PDF, HTML is the best destination format, right?

*Do all readers do a satisfactory job of rendering HTML (for my purposes, like equations and references and all that)? The ones I'm looking most closely at are Cybook, the super spare/cheap EBookwise or a used Iliad.

*And zooming out, can I hear from folks who have tried out this workflow from journal through conversion to reader. Does it end up being automatable enough and readable enough to be worth your trouble? How much overhead and hassle am i looking at?

Thanks
-seth

HTML probably is the target format you should attempt to rip to. The question is how good a job can be done, and that will depends on the PDF.

You can experiment a bit before you get a reader. Download the free Mobipocket Creator and Reader applcations for Windows. You can get them here.

Mobi Creator takes PDFs as one of the supported input formats. It rips to HTML, then builds a Mobipocket document from that. You can preview the results in the Reader to see whether they are usable. (And you can also use the generated HTML directly if your viewer handles it, or edit the HTML before building in Creator to tweak the end result.)

My experiments thus far show Mobi Creator doing a decent job on PDFs done as single column documents without fancy formatting. Fancier stuff and multi-column PDFs don't convert well. If the equations are embedded as images, they should be no problem.

(This presumes the PDFs are not protected by DRM.)

Mobi has a command line creator app called Mobigen that could theoretically be incorporated in a script to automate the process.

Mobipocket is used as the format for the Amazon Kindle, and is supported on the Bookeen Cybook.

The Sony Reader supports Sony's LRF format and ePub, if you have tools to create ePub documents. (Right now, that seems to be Adobe InDesign, and the open source Daisy Pipeline.

I don't know anything offhand that handles TeX to ebook transformations, but I haven't looked. It may well exist.

If you can get your desired content in HTML format, there are also tools to build ebooks viewable on the EB1150.

You may also be able to view PDFs directly, if you get a Sony Reader or an Iliad. The usual issue with PDFs is that most aren't created with the tagging that lets them reflow to fit smaller screens, and are problematic to view on a handheld device.
______
Dennis

[Gianfranco]

Hi!

I have tried converting / manipulating several technical texts for my Cybook Gen 3, but, alas, all automatic converters to HTML/Mobipocket/etc... fail gravely and produce a mess.

My tip would be to just "crop e'm all", see this: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23048