[plamtrue]

Hi,
I'm new to mobile reading. Just got my kindle. And I've been using Calibre. And I'm an OS X user. And there sure are a lot of PDF documents that are giving me trouble.

Currently I'm trying to convert a 39MB PDF (which is only 325 pages btw, but apparently scanned at 600dpi) and Calibre has been working for over an hour. Thus far I've tried to convert about 5 PDF documents and all have failed, resulting in nonsense text, so I'm not feeling very confident about what is happening. I know very little about PDF and conversion, but I am very interested in learning more, and I'm capable of using command-line UNIX tools, and understanding regex, and even some LaTeX.

What I'm looking to find out is if Calibre (or another tool) can:
A) Tell me what's going on inside a given PDF document. It being a container format, what is in there?
B) Convert a small portion, a page, the table of contents, whatever, for debugging purposes, so I can have a clue about what the hell is happening without waiting hours.
C) Convert a pdf to a smaller resolution pdf, maybe, so I can get under the 25MB attachment limit on my email.

After a brief search on this forum I found a few promising leads on converting PDF, but none on learning more about how to debug. I'll keep looking of course, but I'm hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.


Cheers,
PLAMTRUE