Quote:
Originally Posted by Shohreh
I'm going through k2pdfopt's page.
→ When doing "text re-flow", does it 1) grab "text chunks" that sit outside the right margin, 2) move them leftwards + downwards, and 3) joins all the chunks into a bitmap — unless the user chose " native PDF output", so text remains as PDF instructions? |
It's irrelevant what it does for 'reflow' because:
1) Mostly it doesn't work (PDF creator's fault).
2) PDFs often have much fancier layout than regular ebooks, even when 'reflow' works (a small percentage of PDFs) the result is often poor, so you read what ever it was on a 10″+ LCD/OLED tablet (only Scribe is 300 dpi), or maybe it works on the 8″ Kobo Sage (no use of old scanned magazines, but great for most manual / instruction books as they are usually for a smaller than US Comic Book paper size. Far better than the 7″ Libre/Libra2/Oasis (2 or 3) or 6.8″ Android eink. Forget 6″.
And the Kobos now do save crop margin settings per PDF.
On the 8″ Sage I now have about half dozen scanned PD Victorian novels, maybe 30 manuals /instructions, and perhaps a dozen technical references. Only a few of these PDFs useable on the 7″ ereader and maybe 2 instruction on a 6″.
Though the 10.3″ Elipsa is lower pixel count the text is too small on old multi-column magazines to be able to read on the 8″ Sage and the 10.1″ LCD Android tablet not good enough. I've a 10.9″ higher resolution LCD Android tablet on its way, which allegedly is also reading optimised (not shiny). It will not do all PDFs, but more.
There is always the 23″ 4K HDR paper like desktop which is a generation or two past IPS LCD screens.
I used to use ImageMagick or The Gimp to fix badly done scans in PDFs and reduce from full colour to 4bit mono. But
k2pdfopt is simpler. Sometimes I still import a PDF to the GIMP (setting a new resolution). It makes an image with a layer per page. Then I can crop entire image and also use curves to adjust black, white & gamma, then convert to 4 bit (black, white & 14 greys to suit eink) as that allows better readability on text than 1 bit. Then rexport as PDF (earlier version of The GIMP had to export a mpng which was then converted by ImageMagick to PDF.
The
k2pdfopt is great, but I'd only use it to crop, brighten, contrast, resolution and convert to 16 shade (4 bit) mono. If 'reflow' worked then so would copy & paste to LO Writer, which I have done. You still need a decent size ereader and a PDF.
I've been fighting PDFs for 20 years. I still make them myself, for upload to POD (paper). I have to proof format/layout on the big 23″ 4K screen, because mistakes can creep in. Years ago I used Adobe tools or DTP, then a plug-in on MSWord, but now it's a direct export from a LO Writer odt file. Content is proofed via odt edit, extra Save As docx -> epub. Annotations back to desktop (KATE) via Calibre from the Kobo. Originally the paper free work flow used a Kindle (till about 2016).