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frabjous · 03-17-2009, 08:30 AM

Have you tried any of the following free tools from here at MR?

PDFLRF
Rasterfarian
PDFread
SoPDF
PaperCrop

The first three are all PDF > LRF converters (or allow that at least), and yield good looking results in most cases, though I think they're all image based, so can result in very large file sizes.

SoPDF and PaperCrop are PDF > PDF "converters" that can be used to make a PDF look better on a small screen by, e.g., stripping the margins and/or dividing multi-column PDFs into separate pages. SoPDF isn't image based unless the source is, so I tend to use it if I want to preserve a smaller file size.

If start with a very badly formatted PDF, at present, there's not much that can be done, however, as far as I know. The algorithm in this thread might be worth experimenting with, but it looks rather drastic, and I haven't found the time to try to make it work myself.

03-17-2009, 08:30 AM	#3
frabjous Wizard Posts: 1,213 Karma: 12890 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Device: Sony PRS-505	Have you tried any of the following free tools from here at MR? PDFLRF Rasterfarian PDFread SoPDF PaperCrop The first three are all PDF > LRF converters (or allow that at least), and yield good looking results in most cases, though I think they're all image based, so can result in very large file sizes. SoPDF and PaperCrop are PDF > PDF "converters" that can be used to make a PDF look better on a small screen by, e.g., stripping the margins and/or dividing multi-column PDFs into separate pages. SoPDF isn't image based unless the source is, so I tend to use it if I want to preserve a smaller file size. If start with a very badly formatted PDF, at present, there's not much that can be done, however, as far as I know. The algorithm in this thread might be worth experimenting with, but it looks rather drastic, and I haven't found the time to try to make it work myself.