Formatting Margins & RTF ?

[Bob Rose]

Hello,

Have ordered the Sony reader.
Trying to get a bit of a head start.
Sure does seem like a nifty gadget.

Great forum, and really appreciate all the help to my dumb questions.

I'm the chap that asked previously about formatting what appears on the display into narrow columns (increased left & right margins) for a disabled friend with an eye problem.

One of the replies said: "Using RTF and simply setting suitable left/right margins is probably the easiest way to do it."

So, O.K., let me ask:

- what is RTF ?
- how and where do I get it ?
-how do I use it, etc. ?

Any other "formaters" I should, perhaps, know about ?

And I guess I'm still very curious about news feeds: Besides just downloading a news feed line-by-line which I guess you can do (somehow) from the web, any way of downloading whole pages from, e.g., Yahoo News or similar ?

Much thanks again,
Bob

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Bob Rose

- what is RTF ?
- how and where do I get it ?
-how do I use it, etc. ?

Hi Bob,

RTF is "Rich Text Format" - a popular document format which virtually all word processors support. If you have Microsoft Word on your computer, for example, to convert a document to RTF you simply load it into Word, select "Save As..." from the "File" menu, and on the "Save" dialog box, select "Rich Text Format (RTF) from the drop-down list of "document types".

Once you have your document in RTF format, it can be loaded directly onto the Reader.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Bob Rose

And I guess I'm still very curious about news feeds: Besides just downloading a news feed line-by-line which I guess you can do (somehow) from the web, any way of downloading whole pages from, e.g., Yahoo News or similar ?

Much thanks again,
Bob

You can transform feeds into PDF files using our feature on Feedbooks. If you'd like to transform a whole page into LRF you should try HTML2LRF.

About the formats, there's 2 different categories:
- reflowable: RTF and LRF for the Sony PRS-500. RTF are easy to create but you can't add links, images etc... LRF is much better suited for the reader. With these formats you can easily change the size of the font directly on the reader but you get crappy typesetting (no hyphenation, bad looking justification, sometimes the margins are too large etc...).
- fixed size: PDF files. You can't use a file that wasn't generated for your device, but you get advanced formatting features and good typesetting.

Reflowable seems more suited for e-books, but that's not 100% true. If you're looking for formatting and typesetting as good as a p-book, reflowable format won't suit you. On the other end, if you need different font sizes depending on the light etc... reflowable formats are better.