[Gaaks]

Originally Posted by willus

@Gaaks--it would be most helpful if you could post some examples from the source PDFs that you discussed so that I could try some different options on them.
(Another way would be to send me samples via private message.)

I'm sorry, I ended up completely forgetting about my question here, I actually managed to figure the problem out myself, I'll copy and paste my earlier reply here around spoiler tags to not take so much space.

Spoiler:

Hello Willus, first I'd like to thank you for making this software, it's simply amazing, pretty much all material are in pdf format and k2pdfopt has made some unreadable think on kindle amazing to read.

But I am having problems with photo-copied/scanned material, the kind where there are two pages side by side, I tried using the 2 column feature to split the pages, but I guess that because the scans are low quality the detection isn't working well, some pages get split in the wrong areas and others just don't get split at all.

What I've been doing is, using the crop areas feature and selecting each page, and it works well, the output is in the correct sequence and it treats each crop as it's page, instead of processing the entire image, the problem here is simply that, I can't set a crop for each file, so because of their lack of centering and different sizes, the crop never lines up properly, so I have to do them one by one.

I've also been running into the issue of text getting split in badly centered pdfs, I've been putting -f2p -1 into the additional options like you recommend in the FAQ, but I couldn't the "bp" options in the gui.

And another less common problem is that, there are some high quality color scans, that have the beige color of the page, and the output ends up being grayscale with a gray background which is annoying to read, and I wanted to know if there's a way to make the output monochrome, -bpc 1 sometimes works but the text quality is really, and sometimes the output just comes out completely mangled, I've tried -wt[+] <threshold>, but I think I don't understand how to use that command, because even -wt[+] 0 doesn't output pure white, I was hoping to do something something like -wt[+] 60 since it's a rather dark grey.

I wanted to ask if you have some advice to get better results there, I'm using the GUI version provided on the website.

Turns out that for the -wt option, I was simply using it incorrectly, I was typing "-wt[+]" into the additional options field, instead of "-wt+", so of course the result wasn't what I wanted, after using "-wt+ <threshold>" I could get a good, readable output for my book.

As for my other problems, they aren't related to any specific source pdf files, just questions about the program's usage, for the split text problem -f2p -1 works perfectly, I simply didn't know what the faq meant by "select "bp" from the interactive menu", but as I believe this "bp" option would simply do the same as -f2p -1 I continued using the latter.

And for the crop area feature, the problem is that, although the program can convert multiple pdf files in sequence, you can't have a different crop area setting for each file, so you can't do multiple conversions on pdfs that need cropping in the same instance, and I suppose you wouldn't be able to set additional options for each file either, this isn't a major problem however, as you can simply open multiple instances of the program to convert the files in parallel, I simply wanted to know whether or not there was a way to have a crop setting for each individual file or not, but I don't think I expressed that well in my first reply. But I think that even if you added a feature like that I would end up not using it, as I've read about your program, I came to understand that it is faster to have multiple instances open for multiple file, than it is to convert multiple files on a single instance.

Again, thanks for making this amazing program.