[shen]

I tested libprs500 in the past using the GUI and in very most cases, I was not very happy with the results.
So I switched over to Book Designer and PdfLrf. Depending on my source PDF, one of them gave me acceptable results. Not perfect in most cases, but the LRFs were usable enough for me.
But there were a few cases which didn't give me results I was willing to accept - no fun to read. That's why I was looking for alternative ways. I've tested nearly all known tools and methods from this forum and I was looking for something new, that's how I found out this Mobipocket Creator / BD combo which gave me surprisingly better results on PDFs which I had no luck with.
I'm not looking for the 100% perfectly conversion tool, nor for the 100% perfect output (as I know that this hardly can be done - source PDFs differ so much in quality and layout). And I'm not willing to spend much time in correcting conversions, i.e. in Book Designer. I just want to convert my PDFs fast and with only few user interaction, put the LRF on my Sony, read it and that's all.

What really does the trick here is the conversion and text reformatting from PDF to HTML, which Mobipocket does a great job on. Try it and open the output HTML in your Browser. As PDFs are organized in hard coded individual pages, a conversion to a single floating text on a large single page has to made at first, including images and dealing with italics, bold text, eliminating page numbers, headers, footes and so on. MP just deals great with that tasks - fast and automatically.

Once you have it converted to such a HTML page, it's easy to create a well looking LRF, which I do with Book Designer. Of course other utilities may also be used if you start with a HTML page, but I found that this combo does a great job to my literaric PDFs - and they are german in most cases.

This may not apply to all PDFs, but I've tried a few and nothing gave me better results in such a short time.

Try it, it's worth a try - especially if you are not happy with the results you're getting right now, whatever tools you're using at the moment.

For a quick check, you also can install Mobipocket Reader, open your PDF and read the output at the screen. Here you can do fast precheck of the conversion which you can expect from MP. And after a conversion to LRF in BD, the resulting LRF is in most cases at least that good if not better.

I'm very happy with that. And to be honest ... there's not much left to do for Book Designer, most of the conversion tricks BD does are already made by MP. But MP keeps images and italics, eliminates page numbers which BD didn't do very well in some cases.
At least you can define you preferred fonts and font sizes and other formatting options in BD.
So reformatting the text is done mostly in MP and the look and feel is done mostly by BD.
Too sad, that there's no converter from Mobipocket PRCs to Sony LRFs, because this could be a great combo.

Stefan