MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

RWood · 09-06-2008, 07:02 PM

It depends on what the document is, how long it is, and what future use I might have for the content. That said, here is my logic.

For most of the short documents I will just read them on my PC so the rest of the discussion centers on long form documents.

If it is a text only (or with minor graphics) then it is a good candidate for conversion to LRF for the Sony using either BookDesigner or Calibre. Before any conversion I will load the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and crop the pages to remove the header and footer lines so that they do not show in the converted text. The next action is to get the text from the PDF to MS Word for editing. If the basis of the PDF is text then this is no problem and there is a routine in Calibre that will make this almost a sone step process. If however the base of the PDF is a scanned image (say a TIFF, BMP, or the like) then you have to OCR the document. The best I have found for this is ABBYY PDF Transformer ($99) that will take an image PDF file and produce an MS Word file that retains the formatting of the original. I will then clean up the OCR errors. How much I clean up depends on what I intend to do with the finished file.

If it is something for my own enjoyment and the errors are not too bad I will most likely just make it into an LRF and let it go at that. If it is something that I will keep around and reference, then I will spend a longer amount of time on it. If it is something that I will post for others (such as some of the works in the Harvard Classics series, then I will spend a great deal of time proofreading and correcting the text.

If it is graphic intense and for my own use I will use PDF read and pdflrf and look at the results and use the better of the two. Of late PDF read has been winning the face-off about 5:1 over pdflrf.

09-06-2008, 07:02 PM	#6
RWood Technogeezer Posts: 7,233 Karma: 1601464 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Virginia, USA Device: Sony PRS-500	It depends on what the document is, how long it is, and what future use I might have for the content. That said, here is my logic. For most of the short documents I will just read them on my PC so the rest of the discussion centers on long form documents. If it is a text only (or with minor graphics) then it is a good candidate for conversion to LRF for the Sony using either BookDesigner or Calibre. Before any conversion I will load the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and crop the pages to remove the header and footer lines so that they do not show in the converted text. The next action is to get the text from the PDF to MS Word for editing. If the basis of the PDF is text then this is no problem and there is a routine in Calibre that will make this almost a sone step process. If however the base of the PDF is a scanned image (say a TIFF, BMP, or the like) then you have to OCR the document. The best I have found for this is ABBYY PDF Transformer ($99) that will take an image PDF file and produce an MS Word file that retains the formatting of the original. I will then clean up the OCR errors. How much I clean up depends on what I intend to do with the finished file. If it is something for my own enjoyment and the errors are not too bad I will most likely just make it into an LRF and let it go at that. If it is something that I will keep around and reference, then I will spend a longer amount of time on it. If it is something that I will post for others (such as some of the works in the Harvard Classics series, then I will spend a great deal of time proofreading and correcting the text. If it is graphic intense and for my own use I will use PDF read and pdflrf and look at the results and use the better of the two. Of late PDF read has been winning the face-off about 5:1 over pdflrf.