Register Guidelines E-Books Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Go Back   MobileRead Forums > E-Book Readers > Kobo Reader

Notices

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Old 12-24-2012, 01:23 PM   #31
stewacide
Groupie
stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 196
Karma: 1086780
Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo H2O Ed. 2, Glo HD, Glo, Touch
Re: reading PDFs on an ereader, check out mobipocket creator. Does a FAR better job at converting than calibre, and you can convert either the final .mobi or better yet the intermediate .html to ePub. Only reason I have a Windows vm on my mac.
stewacide is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-24-2012, 05:11 PM   #32
jusmee
Wizard
jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,047
Karma: 203682
Join Date: Oct 2009
Device: Libre 2
If a simple program can do the conversion from PDF to a format that works, reflows, and is easily readable, that proves that it is easy and feasible for the reading software on the Kobo to do the same, or at least that part of it that allows the PDF to be read easily.
jusmee is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-24-2012, 05:21 PM   #33
EldRick
Evangelist
EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!EldRick goes to infinity... and beyond!
 
Posts: 470
Karma: 112801
Join Date: Aug 2010
Device: Aura H2O (i86, M96C, Mini&Glo, PRS-950, STR, K-Touch, K-DX, K-3)
David Soulayrol is absolutely correct. The whole point of the PDF format is to allow the author/publisher, not the reader, to control the appearance of the document. It was designed to support typography properly. Think of it as a page sized image, designed to allow printers to duplicate the look of an original document.

Even html/epub/css does not have all the functions of PDF (or of real typography), and therefore, conversions involving graphics or tables will never be very successful.

If you don't like how PDF documents render on a device, get your material in another format more suitable for the device..
EldRick is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-24-2012, 05:48 PM   #34
jusmee
Wizard
jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,047
Karma: 203682
Join Date: Oct 2009
Device: Libre 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by EldRick View Post
David Soulayrol is absolutely correct. The whole point of the PDF format is to allow the author/publisher, not the reader, to control the appearance of the document. It was designed to support typography properly. Think of it as a page sized image, designed to allow printers to duplicate the look of an original document.
I know that's the theory, but it really assumes you are displaying the PDF on the device at least equal, or larger than the target format of the PDF. Any attempt to display on a smaller device, like our ereaders, is quite awkward, and this is why the smart manufacturers have introduced reflow on PDFs.
jusmee is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-24-2012, 06:25 PM   #35
Elfuente
Enthusiast
Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
 
Elfuente's Avatar
 
Posts: 27
Karma: 35180
Join Date: Dec 2012
Device: kobo glo
step by step

Quote:
Originally Posted by stewacide View Post
Re: reading PDFs on an ereader, check out mobipocket creator. Does a FAR better job at converting than calibre, and you can convert either the final .mobi or better yet the intermediate .html to ePub. Only reason I have a Windows vm on my mac.
could you give a quick step by step guide how you do that. I didn´t find out how convert the .html either to pdf, .mobi or epub

thank you
Elfuente is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-24-2012, 10:30 PM   #36
robko
Wizard
robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.robko ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 2,454
Karma: 5469320
Join Date: Jul 2010
Device: Kobo
Quote:
Originally Posted by jusmee View Post
If a simple program can do the conversion from PDF to a format that works, reflows, and is easily readable, that proves that it is easy and feasible for the reading software on the Kobo to do the same, or at least that part of it that allows the PDF to be read easily.
So by that logic it should we should be able to browse all websites, use a word processor and excel etc. To claim it's simple is over-simplifying things if only because of the difference in hardware capability of a laptop/desktop vs an e-reader. The pdf's I use on my Kobo I would curse them it they tried to reflow them. They aren't meant to be reflowed and attempting to do so would cause me grief. It's at least in part personal preference. Personally I can thing of lots of other things I'd rather see them put their time into. Obviously you think they should put time into reflow of pdf. Neither of us are wrong nor is Kobo. We (like all kinds of Kobo owners) have different priorities for what we want and Kobo only has so many hours of development time so they prioritize what they see as important (which might not be what you or I want at the top of the list).
robko is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 01:04 AM   #37
stewacide
Groupie
stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 196
Karma: 1086780
Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo H2O Ed. 2, Glo HD, Glo, Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by jusmee View Post
If a simple program can do the conversion from PDF to a format that works, reflows, and is easily readable, that proves that it is easy and feasible for the reading software on the Kobo to do the same, or at least that part of it that allows the PDF to be read easily.
Something like MobiPocket Creator is doing a whole lot of clean-up afterwards - things like filtering out page headings and numbers, de-hyphenation, image cropping, etc. - which would be impossible in real time, at least on current ereader hardware. Yes, you can do a simple reflow without this extra processing, but it looks/reads like crap, see: Calibre's PDF>ePub output.

And of course a simple scanned PDF, which I think is largely what people want to read, is impossible to do any of this with anyway, at least without the additional step of OCRing which introduces a whole extra bunch of problems.
stewacide is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 01:34 AM   #38
stewacide
Groupie
stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 196
Karma: 1086780
Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo H2O Ed. 2, Glo HD, Glo, Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfuente View Post
could you give a quick step by step guide how you do that. I didn´t find out how convert the .html either to pdf, .mobi or epub

thank you
In MobiPocket creator import the PDF. The software will then do its thing and dump the resultant .html file and associated images in a folder in your home directory somewhere, and offer to display the files. It will also offer to create a .mobi, which you can skip since everything Calibre needs is there already. Then import the .html into Calibre, which will show up as a .zip (including the images), and convert that to .ePub.

Attached is a screenshot showing the original PDF, the files MobiPocket creator created, and the end-product .ePub after importing and converting with Calibre (I imported the files over to MacOS as MobiPocket unfortunately is Windows-only, so this is even easier in Windows). The original PDF is unreadable with tiny text, while converting directly with Calibre results in a mess of layout artefacts, but using MobiPocket as the front-end results in a final .ePub that looks like an official ePub, for a book that's very unlikely to ever get an ebook release. Would be amazing if Calibre could do this itself, but it's really focused on transcoding between well-formed XML formats, not intelligently dealing with layout issued from a PDF.

I've also had good success with MobiPocket with multi-column documents, and even some docs I scanned and OCR'd myself using Acrobat. Calibre doesn't even come close.

p.s. tried to convert the same book from PDF to .html with Acrobat to see how they stack up: the Acrobat conversion was totally unreadable: inserted random spaces inside words everywhere for reasons I can't figure out since they're not in the raw text if I just copy-paste it. The only thing Acrobat seems to have over MobiPocket is better handling of tables. Also the notable downside of costing money.
Attached Thumbnails
Click image for larger version

Name:	Screen Shot 2012-12-25 at 3.17.37 PM.PNG
Views:	426
Size:	797.8 KB
ID:	98181  

Last edited by stewacide; 12-25-2012 at 02:07 AM.
stewacide is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 02:14 AM   #39
ghero
Connoisseur
ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.ghero ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
ghero's Avatar
 
Posts: 66
Karma: 602280
Join Date: Nov 2012
Device: Currently owned: Nook HD+, pyrus mini. Previously owned: Sony prs-t2.
I think when come down to the format support issue, you would have also to consider the business model of the e reader maker: do they want to make money mainly on the device they are selling you, or mainly on the e books which you will by from them?

I think for kobo, it is quite clear, they use high hardware specification to attract customers, but the end goal of doing this is probaly not to sell it for only 129, but they want the device to lead you to buy their books -- currently mostly (if not only) epub formats. If they were to make glo to adapt better on other formats, they will spend more (on the format adatpation developments) and earn less (since you will be less willingly to buy their books because you will have much broader choice of books to read conviniently from and not to buy from them). So base on this point of view, it is easy to explain why kobo is doing what ever it takes to make glo looks better and ads, but once you have got it, you realize you just don't want to use glo to read formats like pdf, and then you settle down by thinking it is just probaly a epub reader, and start to consider if you should by an epub from kobo store.

In contrast, like sony readers, eventhough sony has its own online book store, but it seems sony focuses more on hardware profits, at least more than kobo does. This could explain why sony makes its reader more pdf format adaptive and a lot features that makes you read conviniently, but at the same time, down grading the hardwares on the recent models, while attempt to rise market price of the product.

So basically in the end, I think for the issue of formats, it is how the companies want to profit will mostly deternmine what kind of reading experiences the customers will eventually get in the end.

Last edited by ghero; 12-25-2012 at 02:27 AM.
ghero is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 02:57 AM   #40
jusmee
Wizard
jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,047
Karma: 203682
Join Date: Oct 2009
Device: Libre 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by stewacide View Post
Something like MobiPocket Creator is doing a whole lot of clean-up afterwards - things like filtering out page headings and numbers, de-hyphenation, image cropping, etc. - which would be impossible in real time, at least on current ereader hardware. Yes, you can do a simple reflow without this extra processing, but it looks/reads like crap, see: Calibre's PDF>ePub output.
Actually it doesn't look like crap. (EDIT: well maybe Calibre's efforts do, as mentioned in a post above) but I used an ereader that does PDF reflow for a year or more before I got the Kobo. It worked well, and made it possible to enjoy reading PDFs. So, I am not speaking theoretically, it can be done, it has been done, very successfully.

Quote:
Originally Posted by stewacide View Post
And of course a simple scanned PDF, which I think is largely what people want to read, is impossible to do any of this with anyway, at least without the additional step of OCRing which introduces a whole extra bunch of problems.
It is quite clear from the discussion - and I am sure I mentioned it somewhere - that we are NOT talking about scanned image PDFs.

Last edited by jusmee; 12-25-2012 at 03:01 AM.
jusmee is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 02:59 AM   #41
jusmee
Wizard
jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.jusmee ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,047
Karma: 203682
Join Date: Oct 2009
Device: Libre 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by robko View Post
So by that logic it should we should be able to browse all websites, use a word processor and excel etc. To claim it's simple is over-simplifying things if only because of the difference in hardware capability of a laptop/desktop vs an e-reader. The pdf's I use on my Kobo I would curse them it they tried to reflow them. They aren't meant to be reflowed and attempting to do so would cause me grief. It's at least in part personal preference. Personally I can thing of lots of other things I'd rather see them put their time into. Obviously you think they should put time into reflow of pdf. Neither of us are wrong nor is Kobo. We (like all kinds of Kobo owners) have different priorities for what we want and Kobo only has so many hours of development time so they prioritize what they see as important (which might not be what you or I want at the top of the list).
I am astounded that people can argue that it is so hard to do, when it's been done, very successfully, by other ereader manufacturers. It doesn't make the PDF into a perfect epub, but it makes it much more pleasurable to read, and that's all we are asking.
jusmee is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 05:43 AM   #42
Elfuente
Enthusiast
Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
 
Elfuente's Avatar
 
Posts: 27
Karma: 35180
Join Date: Dec 2012
Device: kobo glo
Quote:
Originally Posted by jusmee View Post
I am astounded that people can argue that it is so hard to do, when it's been done, very successfully, by other ereader manufacturers. It doesn't make the PDF into a perfect epub, but it makes it much more pleasurable to read, and that's all we are asking.
that´s exactly the point!

thanks
Elfuente is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 06:06 AM   #43
Elfuente
Enthusiast
Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.Elfuente turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
 
Elfuente's Avatar
 
Posts: 27
Karma: 35180
Join Date: Dec 2012
Device: kobo glo
no .epub

Thanks for your prompt reply

Quote:
Originally Posted by stewacide View Post
but using MobiPocket as the front-end results in a final .ePub that looks like an official ePub, for a book that's very unlikely to ever get an ebook release. Would be amazing if Calibre could do this itself, but it's really focused on transcoding between well-formed XML formats, not intelligently dealing with layout issued from a PDF.
.
The way through Pdf->MobiPocket(.html)->Calibre(epub) is actually what I did. And how to make an ePub with MobiPocket without using calibre?
There is no obvious choice to convert to .epub or .mobi. There is an option to make epub but the result is a punch of files;.html, .opf, .prc, .xml, .jpg, .png
Elfuente is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 08:15 AM   #44
stewacide
Groupie
stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.stewacide ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 196
Karma: 1086780
Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo H2O Ed. 2, Glo HD, Glo, Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfuente View Post
Thanks for your prompt reply

The way through Pdf->MobiPocket(.html)->Calibre(epub) is actually what I did. And how to make an ePub with MobiPocket without using calibre?
There is no obvious choice to convert to .epub or .mobi. There is an option to make epub but the result is a punch of files;.html, .opf, .prc, .xml, .jpg, .png
The PRC file is already a mobi ebook AFAIK.
stewacide is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 12-25-2012, 09:45 AM   #45
PeterT
Grand Sorcerer
PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.PeterT ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
PeterT's Avatar
 
Posts: 12,124
Karma: 73448616
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Toronto
Device: Nexus 7, Clara, Touch, Tolino EPOS
Think about it for a second! MobiPocket ..... Why on earth would a program that was designed solely for the purpose of making Mobi content have the ability to create an alternate format such as ePub that was totally foreign to the ecosystem that the Mobi format was intended for.
PeterT is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
pdf, reflow, support, turn page, zoom

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Glo How to import reading Life Statistics from Kobo Touch to Kobo Glo? the_m Kobo Reader 5 12-13-2012 03:40 PM
Glo Kobo Glo cloud sync of bookmarks, read status, highligts and notes? flips01 Kobo Reader 4 11-24-2012 07:31 AM
Kobo Glo fonts compared to Kobo Touch RobertJSawyer Kobo Reader 3 10-11-2012 12:10 AM
Kobo Glo Vs Kobo Touch Sizes (Want to use my Skindigital cover) Chocky Kobo Reader 3 09-25-2012 10:47 AM
Best eInk ereader for PDFs? or How do I cope with PDFs on the Kobo Touch? GvilleBridge Kobo Reader 8 01-19-2012 07:22 AM


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 02:59 AM.


MobileRead.com is a privately owned, operated and funded community.