Yet another PDF to LRF converter

[Tuello]

cacapee, you rock! Version 0.9 does a great job on the book that was giving me trouble. Thanks for the great customer support

[godel10]

Originally Posted by cacapee

I was afraid of that. I made sweeping changes to the lrf outputter but obviously I could only test it with my Sony Reader. Let me look into it.

I do not know if this can help you, but the lrf output is neither working with editlrfmeta. I mean that this tool complains with the lrf generated and does not answer the metadata (title, author, etc) of the lrf file.

If you manage to generate an lrf output that works with editlrmeta, I think it could work well in Librie.

[ereszet]

Originally Posted by cacapee

png output should be possible. I dunno about pdf output. What do you need it for? Will you want to change the output size?

Attached pictures show photos of lrf and png screens for Sony and png screens for Archos 704 (for comparison).
Pictures with "max" in their name show maximum details available in respective png screens.
Sony.lrf is an output from pdflrf with maximum details available (a page splitted in two).

Conclusion:
Png format makes it possible to read city maps even in Sony. What's more, it can be used universally outside of Sony world and can be converted to any image or pdf/djvu format.

[Shake]

You tool is really great! I love it.

Unfortunately I get the following errors:

Couldn't find a font for 'Helvetica'
Couldn't find a font for 'Times-Roman'
Couldn't find a font for 'ZapfDingbats'

This error does not occure for all PDFs - just for a few. But the fonts are installed:


fc-match Helvetica
NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"

fc-match Times-Roman
NimbusRomNo9L-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Regular"

fc-match ZapfDingbats
DejaVu-Sans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cacapee

I was afraid of that. I made sweeping changes to the lrf outputter but obviously I could only test it with my Sony Reader. Let me look into it.

Please don't do anything that's going to do something to the LRF to make it not as good as it is now just for backwards compatibility please. What you could do is a switch for Libre compatability with Reader as the default LRF mode.

[cszhy]

It's so nice of you to put the ghostscript option back!!!
thanks buddy ^_^

[cacapee]

Hi ereszet, I noticed that the lrf thumbnail is displaying the status bar in landscape, but is not using Sony's landscape mode. Is there a hack that will enable that?

[ereszet]

Originally Posted by cacapee

Hi ereszet, I noticed that the lrf thumbnail is displaying the status bar in landscape, but is not using Sony's landscape mode. Is there a hack that will enable that?

Hi cacapee, the hacks I installed have nothing to do (I beleive) with that display.

I used the hack builder to install: small menu font, direct page control, clock, delete book, total page counter. I lost the possibility to change slideshow settings. After installing the hacks all my pictures were shown for half a second. If I wanted to see picture one out of three, the display went immediately to picture three and blinked every half a second. I couldn't set slideshow to off. Finally, I discovered that I can restore default settings, which include "slideshow off". But now, I cannot use the slideshow, which is useless anyway for poor quality gray rendering of color photos (you should see my Archos 704 color slideshow - more vivid than on my laptop).

So, the hack of status bar in landscape mode is probably - in a way - of your making. I process pdfs through your pdflrf with 90 degrees rotation, and it is displayed in Sony's portrait mode with the status bar down there.
The status bar is displayed in landscape when I push the size button to change from portrait to landscape. What happens is that the lrf page is split in two vertically and I can see scaled up half pages separately. Very useful for maps, less convenient - but sometimes necessary - for texts in small fonts.

[balok]

Originally Posted by cacapee

png output should be possible. I dunno about pdf output. What do you need it for? Will you want to change the output size?

Output in PDF is a good idea because it will definitely outlast BBeB, and may turn up on future ebook readers.

Output in formats other than lrf would make this tool useful for other devices. We do in fact expect at least two new 6" e-ink devices in the near future, which will need a tool like this one for reading pdf. Both will be reading mobipocket format, so output in prc would surely be appreciated. The Iliad also reads mobipocket, if I'm not mistaken. Besides that, there are other electronic gadgets with small screens that could benefit from your neat little program (what formats do they read?).

Btw, cacapee, thanks for this great program. I use it practically every day. Thanks also for the linux build. I bet the OSX people are getting impatient... I hope they can run wine at least.

[cszhy]

Hi Buddy
when I use the version 0.9 converting some txt pdf
I got 5 error box said
"AFPL Ghostscript" 8.51: "unrecoverable error" "exit code 1"

what does that mean? what can I do ? thanks!!!

[cacapee]

PM me a link to the file. I'll see what the problem is.

[ereszet]

I share here my experience based on processing tens of thousands of paper documents into a digital form using my camera, my repro v-cradle setup of my design described earlier, and lots of free, demo, and commercial software.

The source of original paper books / documents images can be either a scanner, a digital camera or internet djvu/pdf files. I am discussing image pdf files rather than text pdf files. The best pdf format is "text under image" because you get exact image of the original page plus a text underneath that can be indexed and searched in your computer (alas no search is available in Sony Reader or other book readers that I know).

If the original images are of good quality, the only tool you need is pdflrf by cacapee. It will resize and rotate the pages, remove white background surrounding the text (if it is a clean background), and it will fatten the fonts to make them more outstanding when displayed by Sony Reader. It is extremely fast in comparison to any other program I know. As far as I understand, the most time consuming stage of pdf to lrf conversion is extracting images from pdf. Usually djvu to lrf (by pdflrf) is much faster. I believe that the fastest process would be to use scanned or camera images as a direct input to pdflrf, but I do not dare to ask cacapee to do that (I already requested him to add png images to the output for the reasons that I will explain later). Pdflrf is available for DOS with a nice Windows interface and for Ubuntu Linux. Djvu conversion is faster in Ubuntu but pdf conversion in Ubuntu is much slower (same algorithm according to cacapee, but apparently DOS image extraction implementation is better than the one in Ubuntu, plus pdflrf in Ubuntu complains frequently with warning messages about missing fonts end "blocks" while producing good results - why it complains about missing fonts if the input is image rather than text is beyond me).

Of course to convert your scanned or camera images to pdf or djvu you need a program that can do that. As there is a plethora of free programs both for Windows and Linux, I am not going to discuss that. Just note that you can print to pdf or djvu any document/image that can be browsed in a program that allows printing (you cannot print lrf though - a challenge to developers).

In a perfect world pdflrf would be all you need to get lrf files readable with your Sony Reader (a few hundred pages in your free evening time, including the time to photo scan the documents). But the input to pdflrf may be of poor quality either because you didn't take time to shoot the photos properly or you use poor quality google books pdfs or you get djvu files from digital libraries that are based on old microfilms. So you need some preprocessing.

I will concentrate now on camera images. The first stage is to get your images from a camera to the computer. You may do it with the software provided by the camera manufacturer or other developers, but I use Picasa offered free by google both for Windows and Linux. I use it also to automatically correct contrast and color in a batch of photos. Contrast is expecially important for further processing. I once took a number of document photos just by "shooting from the hip" in a dark hotel room. In the resulting images the text was hardly discernible from the background. Picasa took care of that.

If you have a lot of time and patience, you can use Picasa to correct other aspects of your photos (like cropping to remove background, deskewing, correcting white balance, etc.) but image after image rather than in a batch. It is manageable for a dozen of images or so but would be rather time consuming for a book with some hundred pages. Therefore we need other programs that can do additional processing in batch.

The one I use for further batch processing is the commercial Finereader 8 program. Basically it is for OCRing the images/pdf input (does not take djvu) but its preprocessing abilities ares very useful. With it you can split the double pages, adjust the resolution (from 96 or even 72 dpi to 600 dpi and more), convert to black and white (the algorithm is quite good), deskew the lines of text (the algorithm is rather poor), clean the small spots, and remove anything which is not text or images by saving only the recognized blocks (for batch saving it requires a special trick that I will describe in another post). Finally you can save all the pages to pdf ("text under image" or a number of other formats, but not djvu). I eagerly await the next version of Finereader, possibily with better cropping option, better deskewing and an option to save blocks of text and images in a batch process. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Finereader marketing policies keep them from issuing new versions fast (version 8 is more than 2 years old). Their developers are ingenious, but marketing people do not want my money for a new version (same with Canon - my Powershot Pro 1 is more then 2 years old).

That's all for now folks. My description of specialized software for processing poor images will follow soon. In the meantime, you can have a look (search the net) at the BookRestorer (very expensive, comes with commercial photo scanners) or ScanKromsator by bolega (Russian interface, free and powerful) or Snapter by Atiz (demo available - it is slow and not fit for real batch processing but it is fun to experiment with). Those of you who have any experience with free GIMP and ImageMagick or Adobe (commercial) Photoshop/Lightroom plus various plug-ins or similar heavy wieghts are welcome to share their experience. But remember the we are considering here speed, batch processing, ease of use, and a special application (not just improving family photos).

[ereszet]

Cacapee, I draw your attention to my post "Software tools to convert paper documents to lrf with thanks to cacapee for pdflrf" in Sony Acessories.

[ereszet]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I have a request. A couple of my free PDFs have tiny marks right on the top and bottom edge of the page. This prevents it from being cropped. The one PDF I have done so far is about twice the size it should be. Can you figure out a way to fix it?

This is a really nice tool.




An example should be attached.

Nate, see my post "Software tools to convert paper documents to lrf with thanks to cacapee for pdflrf" and the ones that will follow in Sony Accessories. If you attach your original pdf file rather than lrf, I will see what is the best method to remove "white" space with marks and I can (with your permission) use it as an example in my thread.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ereszet

Cacapee, I draw your attention to my post "Software tools to convert paper documents to lrf with thanks to cacapee for pdflrf" in Sony Acessories.

See post #177 in this thread.I moved it because it did not fit with where you placed the post.