soPdf - Better than Yet another PDF to LRF converter

[=X=]

Originally Posted by joedevon

I've tried so many things, kinda giving up on being able to change the font. Now the only thing I'm hoping to find is a way to add bookmarks to chapters from outside the Reader. Doesn't seem like Calibre will do it & no luck w/ the other tools I've tried. BookDesigner has been way too frustrating to deal w/ ...at least w/ the PDFs I'm working on...shame because it looked to be the easiest way to deal w/ bookmarks.

To change font(warning not for the faint of heart) see link to "Poor mans way to edit PDF files."

To add/edit Meta data on PDF I use BeCyPDFMetaEdit.

=X=

[joedevon]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Since I'm a LaTeX user, if I wanted to do this, I do such things with pdflatex and the pdfpages and/or hyperref packages.

Never heard of LaTeX.

However, what is your input file format? Already PDF?

Yes.

Do the PDFs already have bookmarks, and you're just trying to preserve them through the conversion process, or are you adding new ones?

If I can preserve them that would be dandy. There are some instances where editing them would be nice, but far from needed. soPDF is stripping them.

Originally Posted by =X=

To change font(warning not for the faint of heart) see link to "Poor mans way to edit PDF files."

Got scared by that one already

To add/edit Meta data on PDF I use BeCyPDFMetaEdit.

Interesting! Are Bookmarks included in the definition of metadata?

It sounds like it has problems depending on what version the source file is though...

[=X=]

Originally Posted by joedevon

If I can preserve them that would be dandy. There are some instances where editing them would be nice, but far from needed. soPDF is stripping them.

Look for a tool called PDFBookmark

It's a command line shareware tool which can extract bookmarks to an XML file and also creates bookmarks from the XML file.

The trial version adds the random string "[ TRIAL * ]" to a few bookmarks, but with BeCyPDFMetaEdit you can remove them.

Originally Posted by joedevon

Interesting! Are Bookmarks included in the definition of metadata?

yes

=X=

[joedevon]

Originally Posted by =X=

Look for a tool called PDFBookmarks

It's a command line shareware tool which can extract bookmarks to an XML file and also creates bookmarks from the XML file.

The trial version adds the random string "[ TRIAL * ]" to a few bookmarks, but with BeCyPDFMetaEdit you can remove them.



yes

=X=

Great!

[moonlit]

Tons of thanks to theguru for this program.

HarperCollins books were mangled on my Reader so I couldn't see chapter breaks, but when I put the files I bought through sopdf they display beautifully!

Pictures here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50408

[hansl]

Originally Posted by =X=

Look for a tool called PDFBookmarks

It's a command line shareware tool which can extract bookmarks to an XML file and also creates bookmarks from the XML file.

The trial version adds the random string "[ TRIAL * ]" to a few bookmarks, but with BeCyPDFMetaEdit you can remove them.

=X=

thanks for the hint. Searching for PDFBookmark and "command line" yields even better results. Note the singular of PDFBookmark.

hansl

[inew]

I am wondering whether this effort can be merged with the multi-column converter?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=184

I see a strong use case for a program with combined functions.

[=X=]

@inew It would be nice but the functionality of the two programs are much different. One program coverts the PDF to images and manipulates the image. The other program crops the PDF.

[kergoth]

I just had to post a reply saying that soPdf is awesome. Technical PDFs were nigh unreadable without it. Either everything is so small I'd get a headache from reading it, or I'd lose formatting and not be able to read diagrams and code snippets. Thanks to soPdf, I can actually enjoy reading coding books on my PRS-505. Now this should hold me over till the Plastic Logic device shows up.. Thanks, soPdf author!

[kergoth]

Originally Posted by Emit

First of all, I finally got a ereader (PRS-505) and I love it, except the screen is a lot smaller than I expected. I don't read novels (pft who has time for those! ) but textbooks and papers, so I really needed something to cut out the margins and basically maximize reading area. Thankfully soPdf does exactly that... but for windows

Attached is my port of soPdf for Linux.

I included a binary plus my sources for soPdf.c and processPdf.c and a brief readme.

the only dynamic dependencies are to common libs like libjpeg, zlib, freetype, etc so it should work out of the box on any modern distro (I tested on ubuntu 8.04..) I also compiled in the optional jbig2dec dependency.

it works for me, i've used it on multiple pdfs ~15-20MB each.
however, YMMV

thanks theguru

What version of fitz/mupdf is appropriate for building this? The july 09 versions don't seem suitable, as there have been some changes. Will look into what those changes are, but I'd like to avoid learning that much about pdfs

[kergoth]

It seems that a good chunk of the PDFs I have run sopdf against end up losing their metadata. These are shown on the sony reader (and in Preview) with no title or author. Prior to running sopdf, the title and author were just fine. The sopdf execution went successfully, and viewing it one can see that it worked, cropped and split as they should be, just the metadata was removed.

[=X=]

if what you mean by mssing metadata is "bookmarks" yes that is an known issue see post #123 on this thread.

[grimborg]

I'm getting this error: This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Any ideas?

I never use Windows so I am (happily) illiterate on it. That was on a (vmwared) wxp.

(Yep, tried wine, doesn't work on it either)

[frabjous]

grimborg,

There's a linux port of sopdf on page 2 of the thread. There's no need to try Wine or fire up a VM.

[grimborg]

GNU/Linux users, check unpnup:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...ghlight=unpnup

It uses pdftk and poster to split pdfs.

EDIT: The port in #43 also removes margins, thus it's probably a better alternative.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=43