Hi Peter.
The short answer is DO IT! The long answer follows:
I am using Acrobat 7 on my PC to read PDFs. Under the "File" menu there is an option to "Save as Text". Having done so, I now have a *.txt file I can load into my Sony Reader. The Reader will give you a choice of three font sizes to display. The txt file is my favorite file format because the font sizes come out very readable.
Sometimes saving from a PDF file can give you fixed line lengths. If this happens you can a/ ignore it. b/ reformat the paragraphs using a programmer's editor. I pulled the following from an earlier post to show how this is done. There is a link to a utility as well, so it is not all that difficult. BTW, when I wrote this I was reformatting text to fit an MP4 player
Quote:
I converted the Palm TX manual from pdf to txt to use here as an example. It is freely downloadable. I saved it as text using Acrobat. I brought it up in PSPad, an excellent freeware programmer's editor. Then I was able to view the txt file in hex mode. The first little bit looks like this:
"User Guide 0D0A 0D0A 0D0A 0C 0D0A Copyright and"
The ASCII codes are:
0D0A = carriage return, line feed (CRLF).
0C = form feed (FF), or page break.
The CRLF is what you are calling a paragraph mark. It commonly shows in most editors as a paragraph symbol. This symbol is not a part of the ASCII character set. The form feed is a page break. Often the FF is close to a number or a repeated string. This is a good clue for the identification of text you might wish to remove.
My problem was to reformat the text to fit a 24 character line and reflow the text at word breaks. To do this I followed the following steps:
1/ Replace all CRLF sequences with <*>CRLF.
2/ Select all the text in my editor (PFE in this case) and reflow it.
3/ Replace all <*>CRLF sequences with CRLF.
Some good free programmer's editors are : PSPad, ConTEXT and PFE32.
Now the text has the proper paragraph formatting and text breaks occur between words. In other words, it is readable. Now if I wish, I can replace CRLFCRLF sequences with CRLF to eliminate extra line spacing. The form feed "0C" character can be replaced by a space or a CRLF sequence -- your choice. I usually replace tabs with 2 spaces and later crunch spaces down by repeatedly replacing SPSP with SP.
There is a small free conversion utility called Storymaster ASCII text reformatting tool that will do the above operations quite satisfactorily. The site will link you to a free download.
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Reading txt files on the Reader is quite satisfying. If you wish, you can go through yet another conversion to RTF or LRF and play with font choices. I hope you enjoy your reader.