turning project gutenberg txt files to pdfs

[kamyar22]

if i turn the sites stories to pdfs will it show up better on the sony reader

[kamyar22]

whic is better pdfs or txt files for viewing on the sony reader

[Azayzel]

Originally Posted by kamyar22

whic is better pdfs or txt files for viewing on the sony reader

The plain text looks fine as it is, although there are hard-coded page numbers in the text that end up at various positions of the page so you might want to run it through an editior to automatically remove all of them. As for converting it to PDF before loading it on your Reader, I don't think that would help any unless you want to set specific margins to suit your taste, though the Reader might take longer to load the PDF originally due to size.

I've just left mine as-is and haven't even edited out the page #'s yet, though I am tempted once I get Office installed back on PC. Have fun with it!

[geekraver]

Another option is to use rss2book to format the HTML version for the reader as either RTF or PDF. Install rss2book (available from the sticky rss2book thread in the Content subforum), then click on File-Subscribe and subscribe to the "Project Gutenberg Sample" feed.

Then go to the book you want on the Gutenberg site; find the link for the uncompressed HTML version, and copy and paste that in as the URL for the rss2book Gutenberg feed. Click Go! and the book will be fetched, converted, and optionally synched to your reader.

[Madam Broshkina]

Also you could try and see if the book you wanted is at Manybooks.net. Pick Sony as your download option. For me it is the easiest option of all.

[HarryT]

I find that the Sony Converter at "Manybooks" produces books with too small a font size to be comfortable for me personally.

RTF is perhaps the ideal format to use with Reader for PG books. There's a superb Word conversion macro for reformatting PG books for the Reader in the "Reader Content" section of the forum. Very easy to use - just load a PG book into word, run the macro, and you're done, with a great-looking book as the result.

I can honestly see no benefit whatsoever in using PDF for PG stuff.

[Govinda]

Does anybody know any editor that automatically removes page numbers inserted at the end of each page in a doc or pdf book?

Thanks in advance

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Govinda

Does anybody know any editor that automatically removes page numbers inserted at the end of each page in a doc or pdf book?

Thanks in advance

No, but it would be straightforward to write a Word macro which selected each line of a document in turn and, if it contained nothing but a number, deleted it. If I have a few minutes free over the weekend I'll have a go at writing one.

[Hadrien]

If you want a PDF file with table of contents, footnotes, and an easy generation system, making the book available for everyone, you can use our Ajax interface: http://www.feedbooks.com
If the book isn't already available, you can add it, this way anyone will be able to get a nice looking version afterwards.

[HarryT]

Hadrien,

The issue I have with PDFs is that they are non-editable documents. Eg, most people seem to like "Serif" (Roman) fonts in documents, but I prefer "Sans Serif" (Swiss/Arial) fonts when reading. With an RTF, if I don't like the font, I load it into Word and change it (or rather I run Stingo's macro which does all the work for me); with PDF, I'm stuck with what's there.

I accept the enormous benefits of PDF for books which need a TOC and/or pictures, but for straightforward "fiction" that you just read from end to end, I completely fail to see the benefits.

Is there some "hidden benefit" of PDF that I'm missing?

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Hadrien,

The issue I have with PDFs is that they are non-editable documents. Eg, most people seem to like "Serif" (Roman) fonts in documents, but I prefer "Sans Serif" (Swiss/Arial) fonts when reading. With an RTF, if I don't like the font, I load it into Word and change it (or rather I run Stingo's macro which does all the work for me); with PDF, I'm stuck with what's there.

I accept the enormous benefits of PDF for books which need a TOC and/or pictures, but for straightforward "fiction" that you just read from end to end, I completely fail to see the benefits.

Is there some "hidden benefit" of PDF that I'm missing?

Well, what you said isn't much of a problem in our case. Since we generate PDF files instead of storing them, you could generate them in any font or size that you'd like.
And yes, there's benefits:
- Embedded fonts
- Support for any language
- Images (you can display math formulas too for example, needed for scientific documents)
- Table of contents
- Real footnotes
- Better overall presentation
It's not much flexible once you've got the file, that's why you have to make it more flexible before you output the PDF. That's what we're trying to do here (well anyone can already do it with LaTeX, but we're trying to make something available and easy to use for everyone).

[Govinda]

Maybe there's a tool to remove page numbers in pdf files with the OCR application ABBY Fine Reader, but i cant find it out

[RWood]

Originally Posted by Govinda

Maybe there's a tool to remove page numbers in pdf files with the OCR application ABBY Fine Reader, but i cant find it out

All I have ever found for removing page numbers is to use the full version of Adobe Acrobat and resize the page to exclude the area where the page number (and perhaps the title, etc) reside.

I agree with HarryT completely. For me for PG books the best converstion utility is Stingo's word macro I have converted many, many files using it.

Most converters can be found on the MobileRead Wiki COnversion Page

Hadrien's PDF conversions are also nice and offer another viable alternative.