Yet another PDF to LRF converter

[WillAdams]

astra, Ghostscript is an opensource clone of the PostScript page description language by Adobe:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

William

[linkamp]

Tanks, for this information. Is a ver usefull program for read very good in the sony prs

[astra]

I am curious.

Why did honorable cacapee disappeared?

Any ideas?

I am suspecting that he is from Sony and he presented us with this program to make our life easier with pdfs.

Any other ideas?

[samu]

Thanks again for this program. I think I'm out of luck but I might as well ask. Is there any way to increase text size either in the setting prior to converting or through the book post conversion? A number of the pdf's I'm converting have fairly small type (even in landscape mode which usually returns more legible text) and while legible, strain my eyes.

[astra]

Originally Posted by samu

Thanks again for this program. I think I'm out of luck but I might as well ask. Is there any way to increase text size either in the setting prior to converting or through the book post conversion? A number of the pdf's I'm converting have fairly small type (even in landscape mode which usually returns more legible text) and while legible, strain my eyes.

Unfortunately, you are out of luck with this one.


Did you use all the default settings? I think it cuts away white margins and turns it to landscape.

[rmanasa]

Originally Posted by Deputy-Dawg

Ambertape,
It is not a problem that either Sony or Adobe can address. The problem arrises from the choice the publisher of the magazine made when he chose to publish the web edition in a format that is essentially a series of photographs, not text.

I'm not sure if your statement describes this circumstance, but I have a series of pdf files from a publisher that work just fine on my Palm - meaning, the text magnification features work as we'd all like them to on the Reader - but that seem to suffer from the "I'm just a graphic" problem on the Reader that you and others have described throughout the forum.

If I did not have this experience, I'd be more willing to accept the explanations offered, but if I can do it on the Palm, why can't I do it on the Reader?

[godel10]

Originally Posted by samu

Thanks again for this program. I think I'm out of luck but I might as well ask. Is there any way to increase text size either in the setting prior to converting or through the book post conversion? A number of the pdf's I'm converting have fairly small type (even in landscape mode which usually returns more legible text) and while legible, strain my eyes.

This time you are not out of luck. Recently there has been a great contribution that allows to transform a pdf into another pdf with bigger letter size. Take a look at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23048

The idea is first to use the pi program from the previous link to create a new pdf, and later use pdflrf with the previously generated pdf. I have been using this method during the last days and it is great.

[reak]

I've been using pdflrf on and off during the last six months or so and I've found a couple of bugs. I wonder if there might be a workaround, especially for the first one.

1. I'm processing a pdf which is a two-column scan of a book (these two columns are in fact the left- and the right-hand pages of the original book). Somewhere in the middle of the file, there's a page with the left-hand column completely blank, since there wasn't anything on that page in the original book. Now, pdflrf crashes there. Just crashes and that's it, it doesn't say a word.

2. Again, processing a pdf which is in fact a scan, if I select "smart cut", I get pages on the Sony which miss some of the content present in the pdf, that is, they are partly blank and the text that should be there is just lost. It seems as if the program cut the page in its "smart" way (leaving some empty space at the bottom of the page) but then forgot to put that chunk of text on the next lrf page. Well, there is a nice way to avoid this problem and it is to disable the smart cut option. But in any case, a bug is a bug and I thought I should report it.

[nathany]

Originally Posted by astra

Why did honorable cacapee disappeared

It does seem like he disappeared, doesn't it. Could he be buried in his Qt port, or perhaps other "life" things came up. Hope he's doing alright.

~

The Sony Reader finally came to Canada, it was sure nice to see eInk in person. Like many people, I have a lot of 8.5x11 PDF eBooks, so I need something like pdflrf or calibre if I'm to buy a Reader to read them.

I'm also a Mac-user... the interesting thing about pdflrf being ported to Qt is that perhaps it can be integrated with calibre depending on whether you want text-based or image-based output. I guess we'll see what happens.

I'd be quite happy with a command line version for Max OS X, for which someone else could start on a Cocoa front-end (or at least a more thorough manual). Of course Mac OS X uses BSD underneath, so threading and such is a bit different from Linux. I don't know much about it, I just know that it'd take a little more than a recompile.

For now, I'm trying out the GUI under VMware, and then viewing the lrf in OS X with calibre (which takes a while). The fidelity is quite good, I would need to diddle the settings to crop off more unnecessary white space (the Pragmatic Programmer books have full width footers but fair margins).

There are a lot of requests here, and I kind've worry that it will get to spread out, rather than just being really good at what it does now.

- nathan.

[catwoman]

Just got my reader a couple days ago. Bought it off ebay so it had a few documents on it already. I have hundreds of eBooks in PDF format and was somewhat disappointed on the viewability after transferring a couple. This converter made a huge difference. All I can say is WOW. Outstanding job. Thanks so much CACAPEE.

[paveli]

I use this convertor and it is very good.
But I can't use it with Ghostscript option enabled.
I have the latest version of ghsotscript installed, but the program returns errors when I try to convert with Ghostscript option enabled.

I see 4 error allersts with the following content:

1) GPL ghostscript
2) 8.62
3) :
4) Urecoverable error, exit code 1

Can anybody help to fix this problem?

And does Ghostscript actually give better quality?

[Dean]

I am pursuing my PhD, which means lots of reading. Because of this software I am now able to read my pdf papers while hiking into school. I used the two page option which successfully split the page, kept the images and tables, and now I can read. Of course I still have the full paper on my laptop.

So between Calibre, and this pdflrf software I have a usuable device. Oh and I can read books on it too?

So thank-you for your knowledge and sharing.
Dean

[ozJames]

Hi all, super newbie here, only got my reader yesterday and still reading this forum like crazy. when i open pdflrfwin-0.99 i press preview displays nice i press convert it gets to 1% and the program closes no error popup. tried on 2 pcs winxp and vista any ideas
thanks in advance

ghostscript installed and also tried the dos version

pdflrfdos-0.99>pdflrf.exe -i 620318.pdf -o 620318.lrf (also tried with no space same thing happens)

pdf -o 620318.lrf -s
Processing page: 1, Progress: 0
Processing page: 1, Progress: 0
Processing page: 2, Progress: 0
Processing page: 2, Progress: 0
Processing page: 3, Progress: 0
Processing page: 3, Progress: 0
Processing page: 3, Progress: 0
make_weighttab: null filter at -32768

[specialunderwear]

Hi, is the sourcecode to this tool anywhere? I want to port it to apple mac osx.

[Lackbeard]

Sounds very interesting! Any news or rumours about a Mac port?
I for one would welcome it warmly. Even with the new firmware features (PDF reflow), this tool still works a kind of incomparable magic...