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Old 05-08-2012, 02:36 PM   #8
jackie_w
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: UK
Device: ClaraHD, Forma, Libra2, Clara2E, LibraCol, PBTouchHD3
I've been round this loop a couple of times over the last couple of years, trying to help users to read screenplays. The closest look & feel I could achieve was to
  1. open the PDF, highlight all the text and paste into a TXT file. Naturally this will lose any bold and italic formatting. See next post for update
  2. transfer the TXT file to the reader (i.e. no conversion) and read, preferably in landscape mode. It would look best if it could be read using the reader's monospace font
  3. if you have no option but to do a calibre conversion, then it needed to be a TXT to EPUB and use TXT input conversion options which preserve all whitespace and make no attempt to reflow lines into paragraphs, i.e. assume every line is a paragraph. I also specified body {font-family: monospace} in Look&Feel - ExtraCSS

This worked not too badly with my WinXP/Sony reader setup.

What typically went wrong for Mac users was that they were not able to copy/paste in step 1 without losing all leading spaces - thereby losing any semblance of positional formating e.g. centered dialog. Not having any clue at all about Mac I was not able to offer any suggestions.

Also I have no idea whether a Kindle can directly read a raw TXT file or whether you would get a similar result if converting TXT to MOBI with the monospace option.

Maybe there's some ideas here you can try.

Last edited by jackie_w; 05-09-2012 at 10:18 AM.
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