Converting pdf to mobi

[Bigbore]

Hi, new member here.

I download lots of eBooks from the Project Gutenburg site. They give the option to download "for older Kindles", which is what I have. They download fine.

But my Paperwhite only reads MOBIs, so I understand. When I put the pdf into Calibre and convert it to a MOBI, it works okay. On the Kindle the layout is mostly good, but often it's messed up. Words are randomly hyphenated which don't need hyphens. And whole blocks of text are misaligned on the page.

It's not a big deal, really. They're still readable. But it would be better if the conversion didn't produce these glitches.

So, what can I do about this, (if anything)?

Thanks.

[DNSB]

How are you getting PDFs from Gutenberg on a regular basis? The books I've looked at have had:

EPUB3 (also for Send to Kindle)
EPUB (no images)
Kindle (delivers -kf8.mobi so rename to .azw3)
Older Kindles (delivers .mobi)
Plain text (UTF-8)
HTML (in a .zip file)

I just did a random check of 20 books and nary a .pdf to be found. According to Gutenberg's documentation, "Project Gutenberg has some PDF files that were created from other markup (TeX, LaTeX or others), usually for math-heavy eBooks."

As for your Paperwhite only reading mobi format? As far as I am aware, any Paperwhite can read mobi, KF8/azw3 and KFX for Amazon formats plus PDF and TXT. I downloaded the .mobi and-kf8.mobi download of Little Fuzzy (pg18137), rename the -kf8.mobi version to .azw3 and copied them to my PW4 and no issues with displaying them.

I checked Gutenberg for the USA, Canada and Australia.

[Bigbore]

Originally Posted by DNSB

How are you getting PDFs from Gutenberg on a regular basis? The books I've looked at have had:

EPUB3 (also for Send to Kindle)
EPUB (no images)
Kindle (delivers -kf8.mobi so rename to .azw3)
Older Kindles (delivers .mobi)
Plain text (UTF-8)

Yeah, sorry, my mistake. You're quite right, Gutenburg offers MOBIs to older Kindles. I was thinking of another site that I get pdfs from.

My Kindle can indeed read pdf and text files.

"I downloaded the .mobi and-kf8.mobi download of Little Fuzzy (pg18137), rename the -kf8.mobi version to .azw3 and copied them to my PW4 and no issues with displaying them."

I didn't know you could do that. I'll give it a try, see how I go

Thanks. .

[Bigbore]

The thing I find with reading PDFs on the Kindle is that, if I enlarge the text, it goes over the edges. You have to scroll left and right to read all the text.

Am I doing something wrong?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Bigbore

The thing I find with reading PDFs on the Kindle is that, if I enlarge the text, it goes over the edges. You have to scroll left and right to read all the text.

Am I doing something wrong?

That is the way it is supposed to work on a small screen.
Small is a screen less than the size of the document PAGE.
The P in PDF is PAGE, as in printed

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Bigbore

The thing I find with reading PDFs on the Kindle is that, if I enlarge the text, it goes over the edges. You have to scroll left and right to read all the text.

Am I doing something wrong?

Think of most PDF pages as being an image of the page. If you zoom, it does not re-flow so you do have to scroll to see the entire page much as when you zoom an image.

[Bigbore]

Originally Posted by theducks

That is the way it is supposed to work on a small screen.
Small is a screen less than the size of the document PAGE.
The P in PDF is PAGE, as in printed

I see. So my little Kindle Paperwhite, (about the size of a postage stamp), isn't the best for reading pdfs. Well, that's okay, I've got Calibre so I'll just convert everything to MOBIs.

Thanks.

Btw, I've always thought "PDF" stood for "Portable Document File"..

[Bigbore]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Think of most PDF pages as being an image of the page. If you zoom, it does not re-flow so you do have to scroll to see the entire page much as when you zoom an image.

Yeah, I did know that PDFs were like a "photograph" of a printed page. But I thought the Kindle would do something to them to allow them to be resized while remaining inside the frame of the screen. Wrong!

Thanks.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Bigbore

Btw, I've always thought "PDF" stood for "Portable Document File"..

Yes, Portable Document Format. But it's encapsulating a page description language as well as other elements. Every page has a physical size.

Portable means the page is the same on everything, so if the screen can't sensibly display the entire page you have to pan. At the most the viewer can reliably crop margins. However the Kindles enforce stupid minimal margins.

It's meant to exactly preview printing on paper.

[Bigbore]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Yes, Portable Document Format. But it's encapsulating a page description language as well as other elements. Every page has a physical size.

Portable means the page is the same on everything, so if the screen can't sensibly display the entire page you have to pan. At the most the viewer can reliably crop margins. However the Kindles enforce stupid minimal margins.

It's meant to exactly preview printing on paper.

Interesting. Well, that just confirms my decision to always convert PDFs to MOBI.

Thanks.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Bigbore

Interesting. Well, that just confirms my decision to always convert PDFs to MOBI.

Thanks.

In many cases you need OCR.
In all cases better to reformat in odt on LO Writer, an extra Save As in docx and make an epub2. Then convert that to azw3.
Only the K1, K2 and various DX models need mobi, which is only HTML3, only three font faces (in normal, bold, italic and bold-italic), the serif, sans-serif and monospace. No CSS.
Calibre can also do a "dual mobi" which is the old mobi KF7 and azw3 KF8 versions in one file.

[Bigbore]

Originally Posted by Quoth

In many cases you need OCR.
In all cases better to reformat in odt on LO Writer, an extra Save As in docx and make an epub2. Then convert that to azw3.
Only the K1, K2 and various DX models need mobi, which is only HTML3, only three font faces (in normal, bold, italic and bold-italic), the serif, sans-serif and monospace. No CSS.
Calibre can also do a "dual mobi" which is the old mobi KF7 and azw3 KF8 versions in one file.

Excellent info! Thanks again.

Cheers.