i heard the new kindle 2 can now read pdf?

[oncdoc]

i tried to cut and paste to the doc folder but it did not work?

finally just had to email to amazon conversion service. so what the deal?

thanks

[JMikeD]

Have you gotten the 2.3 software upgrade for your K2 yet? It's required for PDF reading.

Don't get your hopes up too much, you can't zoom in on the text, so most PDFs will be too small to read, even when rotated (another feature of 2.3).

Also, you may have to select the Personal Docs sort to see them (that's the thing at the rop of your Home Page that lets you sort by Author, Title, etc.).

Mike

[Mitch G]

I suggest using calibre to convert pdf to mobi. I find PDF to be annoying on the Kindle.
Although, some header/footer stuff might show up in the text, it's generally easily ignored.
Similarly, there are ways to tell calibre to remove it, but you have to create regular expressions that match the given document's header/footer text.

That said, emailing it via amazon and spending $0.10 might be the easiest solution. I haven't tried this yet - does Amazon do a good job converting the PDF for the kindle?


Mitch

[MrEggsalad]

At least in my experience trying to convert a math book PDF with many unique characters and diagrams the conversion service did poorly. In fact, it even broke up plain text into multiple lines, which I am assuming because the characters are not standard ones. If the PDF was pretty much only text however, I would think the service would do fine.

[paperwastage]

Originally Posted by MrEggsalad

At least in my experience trying to convert a math book PDF with many unique characters and diagrams the conversion service did poorly. In fact, it even broke up plain text into multiple lines, which I am assuming because the characters are not standard ones. If the PDF was pretty much only text however, I would think the service would do fine.

you can try using PDFRead to convert the PDF into image files bounded by mobi

can you do me a favor and load these(PDF and PRC) on your kindle and take pictures of how they look? I want to see if converting using PDFRead and cropping the whitespace and rotating to landscape gives a readable version... I'm stuck between getting a Kindle 2 and Kindle DX

(eg sample PDF) http://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/Downld.html

(eg sample prc file generated using PDFRead, pages 1-30, landscape-half)
http://www.mediafire.com/?zmmz2wynxnd

[Americanchild]

I was able to drag and drop PDFs to my new Kindle, however I would need a high powered magnifying glass to read it on the Kindle. I use Calibre to convert to mobi and have been very happy. Amazon still needs to work on the PDF software. Even the Cooler e-reader I sent back did a better job with PDFs then my Kindle 2.

Update: I have found that sometimes Calibre doesn't do a good job converting from PDF to mobi and other times it is wonderful. Therefore I have downloaded the pulishers edition of mobi creator for free from mobipocket and if my conversion with Calibre doesn't work then I try Mobi creator. Between the 2 I am find that I can read all the pdfs I have.

[MrEggsalad]

Viewing PDFs in landscape is the way to go, then they are just fine.

To you paperwastage:
Both were about the same readability, however some sentences were cut in half (like top or bottom parts of words would be missing). Sorry for the blurriness of the pictures my actual camera is dead so I had to use cell phone. I would still opt for getting a PDF and just simply using that in landscape mode versus the PRC. Also, you can't change a font size with PRC so you couldn't zoom in or out.

PDF:


PRC:

[paperwastage]

Originally Posted by MrEggsalad

Viewing PDFs in landscape is the way to go, then they are just fine.

To you paperwastage:
Both were about the same readability, however some sentences were cut in half (like top or bottom parts of words would be missing). Sorry for the blurriness of the pictures my actual camera is dead so I had to use cell phone. I would still opt for getting a PDF and just simply using that in landscape mode versus the PRC. Also, you can't change a font size with PRC so you couldn't zoom in or out.

thanks for the pics....

The sentences cut in half on the PRC are fine... as PDFRead gives you a buffer, those sentences cut in half would appear in full on the previous(or next) page

think i'll try to wait to see if the Kindle DX international comes out before the start of my spring term in college.... if not the kindle 2 still looks good enough