KindlePC/iOS - converting PDF?

[Seanette]

I'm aware that if one owns a Kindle, Amazon has a service to allow conversion of one's personal files to Kindle format. Will this work with the PC or iPhone/iTouch apps?

I have a collection of PDFs I want to put on the Touch, and have been told that this does a good job on multi-column pages of extracting text while not scrambling it together. My game plan, if I can do it, is put the PDFs through the Kindle conversion, then put the results through Calibre (believe me, I tried the direct PDF-to-ePub in Calibre, and it didn't work well at all) to convert to ePub.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Seanette

I'm aware that if one owns a Kindle, Amazon has a service to allow conversion of one's personal files to Kindle format. Will this work with the PC or iPhone/iTouch apps?

I have a collection of PDFs I want to put on the Touch, and have been told that this does a good job on multi-column pages of extracting text while not scrambling it together. My game plan, if I can do it, is put the PDFs through the Kindle conversion, then put the results through Calibre (believe me, I tried the direct PDF-to-ePub in Calibre, and it didn't work well at all) to convert to ePub.

Amazon is probably using a version of the MobiPocket publisher tool to do the conversion. Mobi's tool uses MS Word, RTF, HTML, PDF, or plain text as input, rips to HTML, then builds a MobiPocket file from the HTML.

Instead of using Amazon's service, you could just get their tool and do the conversion locally. You can stop after the "rip to HTML" stage, and use the HTML as the form to convert to ePub.

Don't get your hopes too high. I've played with doing PDF conversions that way, and how good the results are depend on the PDF. Simple PDFs with one column of text and in-line illustrations convert fairly well. PDFs with multiple columns and fancy formatting do not.

You can get the freeware Windows GUI version of the Publisher tool here:
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloa...ilscreator.asp

You can get the command line version that runs on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS/X here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000234621
______
Dennis

[DMSmillie]

Note that Kindlegen, the command line tool provided by Amazon, while originally based on Mobipocket Creator, has been developed further since it was created, so might give slightly different/better results.

/Edit to add/ Actually, I've got a notion that Kindlegen will only accept (X)HTML/EPUB files as input, unlike MobiPocket Creator and Amazon's Kindle publishing web interface. /end of edit/

The email conversion service only works with an actual Kindle, since the document has to be emailed to the Kindle's own email address.