Today I was reading a
Kindle Blog written by switch11 because it was all about Kindle 2 Tips and Hacks. I like to keep these tips on my Kindles, so I set out to create a little mobi book.
I copy and pasted the text into a Word Document. I set the page size to 4.5 inches by 5.75 inches. I added a header and page numbers (just because I could). I also used hard page breaks to get each tip on its own page (unless it was very short and then I'd put 2 on a page). The font was TimesNew Roman at 12pts.
First I tried running the Word file the MPC but wasn't happy with the results, so I decided to use PDFRead after creating a PDF file with
CutePDF Pro 3.6 (the free version) using the same page dimension (4.5 inches by 5.75 inches). I've been using this software for years but never explored all the features available even in the free version.
The results were a pages sized to fit my Kindle but with a huge white border around it. I used the advanced crop tools to create a rectangle around the text on the first page that would be big enough to work for all pages in the PDF. Having that page number at the bottom of the page helped me to make the correct size rectangle. I now had a PDF with a very small border (there is a watermark at the bottom of the first page only which covers the page number - hey, for free what do you want).
I ran that PDF through PDFRead and got a nice sized and very readable pdf.
Edit: As I play more, it looks like this works best with PDFs you create yourself to fit a 6 inch screen. I'm not having much luck with PDFs created previously for 8.5 and 11 in pages (I'm still trying the script PDF in the first post to work).