Improving PDFs for use on Sony Readers

[Agama]

From Adobe Digital Editions Sony Reader FAQs:

Normally, a PDF document is WYSIWYG. However, the PDF viewer in the Sony Reader has a "reflow" mode in which it will reformat the text of the document to enable it to fit into the screen in a larger font. This mode is enabled when choosing the Medium(M) or Large(L) text sizes from the device. In general, this works very well – especially for documents that are mainly text, such as novels or essays. As the documents become more complex, with tables and figures, headers and footers and so on, the readability decreases. For complex, highly-formatted documents it may not be a good idea to reflow them. But in general, you will find most of your documents, especially novels, very readable.

This reflow mode actually works very well and leads to a simple way of using calibre to improve PDFs for use on Sony Readers.

1) Use calibre's pdfmanipulate command line tool to trim off headers/footers in the PDF document, (more details later).
2) Add the PDF to your calibre library.
3) Edit the metadata to define Title, Author, Tags, etc. to suit your own requirements.
4) Send the PDF to your reader.

** DO NOT CONVERT the PDF to another format! **

5) Open the PDF on your reader and zoom to Medium or Large and enjoy your book.

Note: Pressing the zoom button for 5 seconds toggles landscape viewing, which sometimes helps with PDFs.


Using PDFManipulate

This tool installs automatically with calibre and is a gem. It can easily remove PDF headers/footers without the need to resort to any regex processing. You simply tell it how many pixels to crop off the document. With a bit of trial and error you can quickly work out what values to use.

So for example with a book called MyBook.pdf located in folder C:\Books\Work

1) Open the PDF with Acrobat Reader and page down to a page of full text with header and footer.

2) Open a Windows Command prompt (Start > Run > "CMD")

3) CD \Books\Work

4) pdfmanipulate crop -w 40 -y 40 MyBook.pdf

(-w 40 crops 40 pixels from the top and -y 40 crops from the bottom).

5) After a moment or two the command completes leaving a file called cropped.pdf in C:\Books\Work

6) Open cropped.pdf with Acrobat Reader and check it against the original that you still have open.

7) If you need to crop a bit more or a bit less then: Close cropped.pdf and go back to step 4 with different values for -w and -y.

8) Close commmand prompt.

[oldbwl]

Tried that, but everytime it runs I get the message that the PDF is encrypted. I suppose then this will only work on PDF's I have made providing I do not use any encryption.

[Agama]

My PDFs are all public domain, unencrypted and I've had no problems.

[lazyartist]

Any tips on how to do this on a mac?

[Agama]

Do Macs have a command line tool?

If so then try entering pdfmanipulate -h and if pdfmanipulate is part of calibre on a mac then you should get the pdfmanipulate help page. If this works then I guess it's much the same process as for Windows - change directory to where your book is and run the crop option until you get the required result.

If you need more help with mac commands then you'll have to wait for a mac user to post to this thread - sorry!