I know you'll hate me, but I love PDF

[Jellby]

I aim at 105% accuracy, that is, improving on the printed version (fixing typos, inconsistencies, poor printing and bad layout).

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by markom

I usually choose pdf (with OCR layer behind the exact image) even if there is available good epub/mobi made from the scan because I want 100% accuracy for every sign/letter.

You need a device that isn't fazed by the size of your files, though. My Inkpad (which, in theory, should display scanned pages nicely) to my disappointment breaks down when a PDF file has more than a few MB. I suspect it's crappy software, though, rather than a limitation of the hardware, and maybe other readers do much better?

[markom]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

You need a device that isn't fazed by the size of your files, though. My Inkpad (which, in theory, should display scanned pages nicely) to my disappointment breaks down when a PDF file has more than a few MB. I suspect it's crappy software, though, rather than a limitation of the hardware, and maybe other readers do much better?

In all those cases when our eink reader is slow at opening or displaying pdf files we can use k2pdfopt app.

http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Pdf rendering can be slow because of complex pdf compression method involved, because of big pdf page size, because our reader is slow at zooming in landscape mode etc.

In the case of complex compression we should just use bitmap mode in k2pdfopt, resulting with bigger pdf than original e.g. 50 MB instead of original 5 MB, which will nevertheless be simple for majority of eink readers to display quickly.

In the case of very big pdf page sizes we should choose our reader's exact screen size and resolution so that k2pdfopt can adjust pdf accordingly.

For reading in landscape mode we should use k2pdfopt's landscape mode that will automatically crop the margins and cut out the page into a two or three, for the exact landscape screen size and resolution of our reader.

If we have Adobe Acrobat we can choose its clearscan mode or just print pdf out for the exact dimension of our reader or by using its tile mode(poster mode in Acrobat Reader) if we want to read it in landscape mode (e.g. three screens per pdf page).

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...9&postcount=11


Like with Kindle DX, though, the best solution for your InkPad is to install KOReader thereon.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=254659

[IceHand]

I was getting more and more frustrated by my Kindle's missing typographic capabilities that I made the switch to PDF as well. At first I was using a rather complex workflow of Calibre, rtf2latex and manual tweaking of the LaTeX code. But now that I've learned of Jellby's excellent PDF conversion tool using Prince I'm using that instead.

Newer versions of FBReader are doing a good job with kerning and ligature substitution. Hyphenation is OK. It seems not very popular though, I don't know why.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

You need a device that isn't fazed by the size of your files, though. My Inkpad (which, in theory, should display scanned pages nicely) to my disappointment breaks down when a PDF file has more than a few MB. I suspect it's crappy software, though, rather than a limitation of the hardware, and maybe other readers do much better?

I read PDFs on my Nookcolor and I've not had a problem opening and reading any PDF on it, including some in the 5MB range, using the built-in PDF reading software.

I prefer PDF when making ebooks for my own use for the reasons others have outlined previously. Plus, it is extremely easy to accurately format and generate them for my ereader using OpenOffice.org. While I have used Calibre to convert some OpenDocument Text files to EPUB, I dislike the way the resulting ebooks look.

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

I read PDFs on my Nookcolor and I've not had a problem opening and reading any PDF on it, including some in the 5MB range, using the built-in PDF reading software.

Yes, but at 5 MB, they'd still be text-based PDFs, with some illustrations in them. I had meant scanned PDFs, in which all the pages are images of the pages of a printed book. (There can be an invisible but searchable OCR text layer underneath those images.) A small paperback, scanned in color with 300dpi (this is how 1dollarscan.com scans them), will easily give you a file size of 100 to 150 MB. Bookscan.us scans in b/w (not grayscale), which results in much smaller files, but a 240 pages paperback scanned last week still had 17 MB. The OCR software is happy enough with b/w, but the human eye does not like the ragged outlines. The PDF ebooks which I make are something entirely different, but for this particular use -- scan a printed book and read it as it is -- my InkPad doesn't work. I'd be interested to know whether your Nook does?

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

Yes, but at 5 MB, they'd still be text-based PDFs, with some illustrations in them. I had meant scanned PDFs, in which all the pages are images of the pages of a printed book. (There can be an invisible but searchable OCR text layer underneath those images.) A small paperback, scanned in color with 300dpi (this is how 1dollarscan.com scans them), will easily give you a file size of 100 to 150 MB. Bookscan.us scans in b/w (not grayscale), which results in much smaller files, but a 240 pages paperback scanned last week still had 17 MB. The OCR software is happy enough with b/w, but the human eye does not like the ragged outlines. The PDF ebooks which I make are something entirely different, but for this particular use -- scan a printed book and read it as it is -- my InkPad doesn't work. I'd be interested to know whether your Nook does?

I'm not sure if the Nookcolor would be able to handle PDF files that large since: (1) I've never tried it, and (2) The nookBook (the guide for the Nook and Nookcolor) doesn't list a maximum file size for ebooks. The 5MB number I cited includes some PDF ebooks where each page is an image (not a scanned page, just a color picture) of around 30 pages, and my Nookcolor has had no problem displaying them.

[markom]

Originally Posted by RobertDDL

...

The PDF ebooks which I make are something entirely different, but for this particular use -- scan a printed book and read it as it is -- my InkPad doesn't work. I'd be interested to know whether your Nook does?

You can also split a 150 MB pdf into five 30 MB parts and see if you can read it that way.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by markom

You can also split a 150 MB pdf into five 30 MB parts and see if you can read it that way.

I think this might be a practical solution, especially when an ebook can be logically divided into small parts. In a related issue, I've done this with some audiobooks (divided the entire audiobook into multiple albums) to make it more manageable. As an example I divided the audiobook for "Atlas Shrugged" into three separate albums (based on Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the story) since the entire unabridged audiobook is 1,208 tracks. Trying to scroll through that many tracks on my iPod Classic takes a while, and the size of the entire audiobook (3.84GB) makes it impractical to load all of it at one time on my smaller audioplayers.

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by markom

You can also split a 150 MB pdf into five 30 MB parts and see if you can read it that way.

Tried a 20 MB chunk of a larger file, and it totally did not work -- like, more than a minute to turn a page, and then becoming so unresponsive that I started to worry if I'd ever get out of this book again. So, even 10 times faster would still be unusable. I wait for the update they've been promising within the next few weeks for some time now, but with little hope in this regard -- well, there's enough other things for which to hope they might get fixed

[eschwartz]

As markom said above -- use k2pdfopt to reflow the PDF. Even if it is much larger, what matters is the device itself won't have to recalculate the PDF to fit it to the screen and zoom it.

[RobertDDL]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

As markom said above -- use k2pdfopt to reflow the PDF.

Yes, thanks to all of you for your advice! I'd need to speed up the InkPad for this particular purpose, literally, by a factor of 100 though. I'd have to downgrade to 4.4 to try out most of the suggestions, but at the moment it's not that important to me, and I rather wait for their next update and see if that works better. Still, if other InkPad users succeed in reading scanned PDFs, it would be interesting to hear about it!

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

As markom said above -- use k2pdfopt to reflow the PDF. Even if it is much larger, what matters is the device itself won't have to recalculate the PDF to fit it to the screen and zoom it.

I wonder if this is a reason I have so little trouble with PDFs on my devices: I format them for the screen size of the device so it doesn't have to do any type of internal manipulation to fit the PDF on its screen.