Quote:
Originally Posted by shinew
hello, I'm new to the forum and i'm about the receive a kindle tomorrow. I would like to get some info & prepare some PDF books to be loaded onto it. very excited!
I've downloaded Calibre and converted a PDF book to the MOBI format, it looks fine with the built-in reader. Then I found this forum and someone said the PDFReader does a good job converting PDF to MOBI. So has anyone used both and have a preference?
my main questions/concerns are:
1) will i still be able to change font size on my kindle with a PDF->MOBI converted file?
2) will it retain TOC if there is one?
3) which one convert technical books/manual better? such as a programming book or reference.
4) are there better alternatives for grabbing newspaper & blogs(for free) to a kindle than Calibre?
thanks you very much for your help!
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PDFReader doesn't actually convert to a text based file. It converts each PDF page into images and divides each page into halves or thirds in landscape mode (there are multiple options on the program these are typically the options used for Kindle). So the results are as follows:
1. No, since the resulting file will be images with PDFReader there will be no font to change.
2. Yes, it creates a text/link based TOC from the PDF if there is one.
3. Depending on how your PDF is formatted, PDFReader might be better. In my experience, most technical books tend to make the complex PDFs wallcraft mentioned above. If that's the case, it won't convert to text well and you might want to stick to images if you can stand reading documents on the Kindle that way.
4. In my experience, no. Some people like Mobipocket Reader for this but I haven't had much luck with it. Calibre works pretty well for this, though. My favorite way to read the NY Times and Wall Street Journal, though, is to turn on the wireless and go to the mobile sites for each. It works pretty well. I don't have this option on my Kindle in foreign countries, though.
It was recommended by someone on these boards to use Mobipocket to convert a PDF to HTML and use calibre to convert the HTML to Mobipocket. I tried that a couple times and liked the result. That is another option. I don't know if the result is the same as using Mobipocket all the way through but either way, it works as well as can be expected for PDFs and you can change the font size, look up words, search the book, and all that good stuff. Sometimes headers and sub-notes get in the way but that's just one of the issues you have to deal with when converting PDFs. If it's that important to you, you can always edit the HTML file. That takes more time than it's worth for me, though.