Need a recommendation for a PDF Converter

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Yeah, default margins suck for ebooks. I'd recommend using the memoir class (instead of the standard book, report, article...) and reading its excellent manual. Or, at a minimum, use the geometry package thus:

\usepackage[papersize={9cm,12cm},margin=2mm]{geometry}

And where can that manual be found?

(and I'd still love a crash course in creating ebooks for e-ink devices using LaTeX!)

[WillAdams]

The manual for the geometry package should be in the docs folder of your LaTeX distribution.

Failing that, one can always fetch it from CTAN:

http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/...y/geometry.pdf

You might find the ``brotherton'' option in memoir of interest (it was an adaptation of a page layout I worked up when making a .pdf of Mike Brotherton's novel _Stardragon_):

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macr...ontrib/memoir/

If you want a nice front-end, I'd suggest LyX:

www.lyx.org

William

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

And where can that manual be found?

This is as good a homepage as there is: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help...es/memoir.html
Hover on "Documentation" and there's a PDF manual. Or google "memoir class manual".

[Sweetpea]

After a lot of trials and mostly errors (), I finally found out how to size my page, where the text didn't get lost in nowhere as soon as I added a header and footer...

Now I need to figure out how to use a different font...

[frabjous]

Look at the LaTeX font catalogue for fonts you can use easily with normal LaTeX and pdfLaTeX with a standard distribution (and the commands for doing so).

If you need arbitrary font choices, then you're better off with XeLaTeX and the fontspec and/or mathspec package.

[Sullivan]

Originally Posted by timezone

I like Nitro PDF Professional. It is not free and it does takes a bit of time to feel comfortable with it. They do provide excellent support. Only free for a short period but they are very quick to respond. I have used it to convert Word to PDF. I create the TOC in Word and then create the links in Nitro. I am not an expert on PDF conversion programs but I do believe this one is worth checking out if you don't mind paying for the program.

I was going to recommend this one also if you want to give a shot.

[Solitaire1]

frabjous wrote as part of a post:

Originally Posted by frabjous

PDF is in my opinion far and away the best ebook format, so long as the PDF was actually made for your device. PDF's bad reputation comes from people trying to read PDFs that were not made for their devices. There is no way to get decent typography like kerning, ligatures, end of line hyphenation, full font choice, vector graphics, etc., with any other format.

I second this. I format my ebooks and save them as PDFs (using StarOffice/OpenOffice.org) and they render perfectly on my reader and look exactly the way that I want. With other formats (like RTF and EPUB) I've found it difficult to get something as basic as having a desired font type (not a specific font but just serif, san-serif, or monospace) appear consistently in my ebooks.

When it comes to PDFs, I tend to avoid any that are not formatted for the device I'm going to reader it on. For example, I find it easier to read PDFs that are formatted for standard typing paper (8.5 inches by 11 inches) on paper rather than reading them on any screen.

One way to improve people's experience with PDFs is to offer different versions of the same ebook, each formatted for a different screen size. Users can then pick the PDF appropriate for their ereader.

[b.alexandrov]

Hello everyone. I just want to inserting that I enjoyed a free site for converting files. As I recall is free and requires no registration. [link removed by moderation]. Supports up to 2 MB of documents to be converted. I hope someone is helpful.

Best Regards.