Kindle Email Supports PDF Conversion

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Could someone with a Kindle try sending a "scanned" PDF to see if Amazon will attempt to convert to text with OCR? I can probably supply a journal article if you don't have something handy. I'm guessing Amazon will just turn the images into JPGs or some other graphic format, but one can dream.

You are definitely dreaming.

Dale

[tsgreer]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Could someone with a Kindle try sending a "scanned" PDF to see if Amazon will attempt to convert to text with OCR? I can probably supply a journal article if you don't have something handy. I'm guessing Amazon will just turn the images into JPGs or some other graphic format, but one can dream.

I have just tried that. I found an old book on google books and sent the .pdf to free.kindle.com to see if they will convert. No word yet.

I do know that if they can't convert, they send you a message telling you that it was a no-go. So when I hear back, I'll let you know.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

You are definitely dreaming.

Dale

I know, but I'm also curious to see what will happen.

[markbot]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

You are definitely dreaming.

Dale

I think it would be able to read a scanned PDF because the kindle can display pictures.

[gteague]

so far i've been unsuccessful at getting a pdf file into my kindle although i've tried the @free conversion to do it. i'm having about a 40% success rate using their conversions, btw. but the day i tried it they were returning zip files with up to a dozen items in just a couple of minutes.

anyway, can you change the display size of pdfs? the embedded images i've got in my files can't be zoomed, nor can a jpeg i sent over. for example, i've got the sample of george r martins 'game of thrones' which has a map in the table of contents that you can access. very fine and a great feature except you can't read a damm word on the map it reproduces so small. so, if this is the case, are pdfs even going to be useful?

i searched for zoom and enlarge and some other words in the manual and found nothing other than increasing text size.

thanks,

/guy

[rflashman]

Originally Posted by rflashman

Anyone make the free address work? I tried it "xxx@free.kindle.com" but nothing has come back yet.

Finally worked for me, turn-around for a lenghtly PDF (300 pages) was 3 hours. It came right back, added it to my Kindle, and it reads great. It seems a pretty good PDF converter, even a lot of the custom formatting is messed up. Though I'd prefer an option to "convert to images" to preserve formatting.

[tsgreer]

Well, my .pdf experiment went nowhere. I didn't get any reply at all. The .pdf was an old google public domain book and was 6 megs so maybe it was too big. I'll try smaller ones...

[CJinSF]

I sent a PDF ebook to the Amazon free conversion email and got back an AZW in about 5 minutes. I downloaded to my Kindle and everything works fine with the one exception of a couple of pages that have full-page illustrations (too big to display on the Kindle screen). Only the titles of the illustrations were visible.

A nice bonus was that the table of contents was automatically converted so that each entry links to the corresponding chapter.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by markbot

I think it would be able to read a scanned PDF because the kindle can display pictures.

Certainly true but their not going to OCR it and turn it into text IMHO. If they convert it will come back as images. And may require turning the unit sideways to read them or they may bee too small.

We haven't heard anything about the quality and view techniques for images on a Kindle so this would be a good experiment just for that purpose alone.

Dale