Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
The actual screen size of a 6" K3 screen without bottom bar is 3.5" x 4.5". Be sure to use a very small margin, as in 0.1" or you will get a huge amount of whitespace.
Why in the world would you want to create PDFs though? PDF is the worst format available for ebook readers. Create a MOBI or even an HTML and you will get reflowable text and a faster page turn experience.
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Actually the area where the PDF is able to display is smaller than 600x800 (Kindle imposes some margins that you can't eliminate), and the aspect ratio is not exactly the same (because of the margins). So if the goal is to make best use of the available area, and avoid scaling that makes the margins larger than they'd otherwise need to be, the aspect ratio of the source page should match the aspect ratio of the display area of Kindle as exactly as possible. That's what you need to know create a 'template for Kindle PDF documents'.
To figure it out exactly, I would create an image that is basically a solid rectangle with an aspect ratio 'fatter' than Kindle's screen, and another image that is taller. Wrap these in a PDF, and view on Kindle in fit-to-screen mode. Measure the size of the left/right margins for the first image, and the size of the top/bottom margins for the second, and compute the dimensions of the viewing rectangle from these measurements (for max precision, take screenshots and count pixels etc.). Then create a custom ('User') page size in OpenOffice or whatever that matches this aspect ratio, if not the actual physical dimensions of the viewing rectangle on Kindle. The template should also have zero width margins, because Kindle will add margins for you.
There are any number of reasons to want to create PDFs for Kindle. Here are just a few:
1 - you want or need to use particular fonts (display fonts, math symbols, music notation etc.)
2 - you need to use an unsupported script such as Arabic, Hebrew, Indic etc. (font hacks will not really help with these - Kindle's text layout doesn't handle right-to-left or complex scripts)
3 - you have diagrams, tables, or maps that you'd like to be able to zoom into (PDF allows 300% zoom, whereas mobi format only lets you zoom and image to full screen, which may not be large enough)
4 - you want to control the layout for whatever reason, lay out text in more than one orientation on a single page, etc. (you cannot do much of this with mobi format)
5 - you want to create PDF format manga or picture albums (for this we would want to resize the images an exact multiple of the viewing rectangle dimensions in pixels so that no rescaling artifacts occur). Yes, you can also use the picture viewer for this, but with PDF you can get reading progress, bookmarks, page navigation, annotation, contrast adjustment etc.
So it is a worthy goal to figure out what the exact dimensions are.