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I'm going to summarize what I've learned so far about viewing
scanned books on the Iliad - Briefly some manipulation makes scanned
pdf's easier to read. I'm hoping to make some books available soon.
The viewing area is large enough to show small books at their actual
size. As books can have a good deal of white space it is often possible
to change the margins so that books too large for the Iliad can still
be shown at their true size. I've done this for 20 or so books so
far by using adobe acrobat and adobe photoworkshop. I prefer photoworkshop
for this as it is more versatile than acrobat and easier to fix up the
odd page of a different size. I convert the pdf to tif pages with acrobat;
use a batch action with photoworkshop to adjust the margins (canvas size); and
then reconvert the pages back to pdf with adobe acrobat. Even though the
resulting file is a pdf ver 1.4 there seem to be a few glitches on the
Iliad - an occasional page which does not load completely or shows the wrong
size. A pass through Adobe distiller via a ps file seems to help - perhaps some
one who knows more about pdf's might comment. Of course it might be due to
my Iliad's lack of a working battery - it does turn off unexpectedly now and then.
I see that Sony's book reader is supposed to display pages at right angles to
give a wider viewing area - holding down the "size button" for 5 seconds rotates
the page to the wider view showing the top half - see the Sony answers on the
Sony forum. I assume the Iliad will eventually be able to do something similar.
Using a variation of removing white space described above I've used the
90 degree trick to give a wider viewing area for the Iliad. Make two copies
of the tif files and pass each through photoworkshop, one to produce the
top half pages and one to give bottom half pages. Use a global rename to append
an a to the bottom half page file name so that when contained in a single directory
the pages will interleave. Then assemble with acrobat and rotate all pages
90 degrees clockwise. It's best to have a 0.1 to 0.15 inch overlap between the
top and bottom half - more is distracting - less can cut through a line of
type.
That's it for now - a nice display and I hope to be able to carry it around
soon - called the 408 number and have received e-mail - Comments?
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