I found way to vastly improve displaying of text!

[Paul Moews]

I think I have found a way to better present 600 dpi
bitmaps of text - It involves a simple manipulation in
adobe photoworkshop -

Take the page and convert it to gray scale - blur it slightly
- reduce it to 158 dpi and a size which just fits the display -
I used a height of 5.8 inches - do it as a single bicubic
reduction - the resulting png looks good and it can be converted
to a PDB which also looks good.

The letters now have fading edges here and there instead
of jagged edges.

[Malder1]

I just found way to render RTF textes as image with perfect antialiasing, crisp and clear. No jaggies. Excellent quality!

I'll write small utility RTFtoPDF soon.

[kusmi]

I tried xpdf on my mac (version 3.01), there the antialiasing looks just fine, so it seems specific to the ilIad (or other handheld) version. Perhaps this is related, as the iLiad has no floating-point operations and therefore scaling/antialiasing works different than on my mac...

[Paul Moews]

See previous post about scanned books -

I have tried a number of treatments to get scanned books to
display without jagged edges to the letters.

As suggested by Malder1 it looks like one has to prepare the file
so that the Iliad software does not have to scale the images.
That is make you images just fit the display so that whatever
one prepares is what one sees.

It seems that no scaling is required if the image just fits the
height or width of the display whichever is limiting.

Bicubic scaling leaves jagged edges when done on bitmaps. One has
to change the bitmaps to grayscale and then scale down to fit the
Iliad. The blurring I mentioned in a previous post doesn't seem
to make much difference - still thinking about it. My latest
results, which are good, are simply done: convert the bitmap to
grayscale and then bicubic scale done to exactly fit the Iliad screen.
The one drawback is that the files become much larger. Still the
process can be automated and it's just one more step in getting the scanned
images ready for the Iliad.

Malder1 - why do you use 759 x 933 images? Is that exactly what
the Iliad leaves us to work with? I'm not completely happy about
having to exactly fit the Iliad screen but I can at least read
prepared books without being annoyed by poorly formed letters.
The Iliad's ability to show grayscale well makes this possible.

[ath]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

So far Tiresias in xpdf is just looking anti-aliased to me. I'll go shoot some pictures of minimo in action. And shoot some pictures of some of the core Adobe 35 type faces in xpdf as well.

I can't find any 'Tiresias' typeface -- only Tiresias Screenfont, Tiresias PCFont, etc. Which one are you using?

'just looking anti-aliased'? Isn't that how it should look -- with greyscale levels to handle partial pixels? If you're seeing doglegs (typically in character stems that aren't even), typeface hinting may be faulty, or not done correctly by xpdf.

[Malder1]

I prepared simple test utility which converts RTF documents to TIFF images:

PDF with text as TIFF image:
http://www.wnsoft.com/test/ImagePDF.pdf (55 KB)

PDF as usual text:
http://www.wnsoft.com/test/TruePDF2.pdf (25 KB)

My simple utility for iLiad.
http://www.wnsoft.com/test/TextToIliad.exe (300 KB)

[vranghel]

Originally Posted by Malder1

I prepared simple test utility which converts RTF documents to TIFF images:

PDF with text as TIFF image:
http://www.wnsoft.com/test/ImagePDF.pdf (55 KB)

PDF as usual text:
http://www.wnsoft.com/test/TruePDF2.pdf (25 KB)

My simple utility for iLiad.
http://www.wnsoft.com/test/TextToIliad.exe (300 KB)

Great program!

Now if i only knew how to use it

I loaded the rtf file and i got a bunch of tif files.
Now what do i do with those? I dont know how to use command line to create the pdf;
Could you make a 'Quick start' for the rest of the clueless like me?

thanks!

[Malder1]

I'm afraid no universal solution at this moment.

You only can download and buy "Image To PDF Command line" convertor and my utility will use this product for auto creating of ready PDF from RTF files.

It's temporal solution while iRex working on this problem.

p.s. I uploaded updated version of my utility because I found that text since second page had bad antialiasing of text.

[vranghel]

Originally Posted by Malder1

I'm afraid no universal solution at this moment.

You only can download and buy "Image To PDF Command line" convertor and my utility will use this product for auto creating of ready PDF from RTF files.

It's temporal solution while iRex working on this problem.

p.s. I uploaded updated version of my utility because I found that text since second page had bad antialiasing of text.

Isnt it possible to convert the tif's to pdf using acrobat? I wanted to do so but because of the numbering of the tif files they loaded into acrobat in the wrong order.



EDIT: I converted the tif files to pdf using "Combine into Acrobat" but i got a really ugly result: really bad jaggies and letter 'shades'

[Malder1]

It's necessary to correctly place TIFF to PDFs. See my PDF files, PDF created from TIFF image looks fine and better.

[vranghel]

I downloaded the Image to pDF shareware, but i still couldnt get it to work;

I ticked the "Create pdf with ...." then pointed to the location of the program, then i opened the rtf ; The tif files were created succesfully but the program hangs after that... Any suggestions?

[Malder1]

Sorry, I don't have time to explore this proble, I wrote it only as demonstration.

I recommend all to write iRex about font smoothing in PDF viewer. The more responses they receive more soon they fix this problem.

[alex_d]

Hey, do people still care about this topic?

I've discovered a very similar thing on my sony reader. i've done a bunch of experimenting and even wrote a script. it could possibly be ported to this side if people would like.

[R2D2]

Regarding Document Scanning:

Some time ago I decided to put my money into a Fujitsu ScanSnap. It costs some hundred Euros but it comes with Acrobat 7 Standard (probably 8 now) and in contrast to nearly every other scanner on the market in the same prize range it scans both sides of a page at the same time. It is a great tool and it works absolutely without flaws. You can set it up the way that you get a OCRed PDF (original layout with text hidden behind, so that searches and cut and pasting is possible) of 50 pages in maybe 5 minutes or less. It's really fast. The time you needed to read this sentence it would have scanned 3 pages duplex.