PDFRead 1.8.2 released!

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Message deleted

What?

[london365]

i have just read ur artical and it is excellent..i have also download it..but do i have to buy it??i m not understanding....plz help me

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by london365

i have just read ur artical and it is excellent..i have also download it..but do i have to buy it??i m not understanding....plz help me

The software is freely distributed, but remains copyrighted by the creator:

## Copyright (c) 2007 Ashish Kulkarni
##
## Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
## copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
## to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
## the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
## and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
## Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

Just download, unzip and install the PDFRead Installer program in post #1 of this thread. No need to "buy" it!

Enjoy!

[yellow1912]

Is there anyway I can make the converted text read-able or at least "sizeable" on my kindle2? I used Savory and it could convert some pdf books that way, the problem with it is that it is too slow and often hang up on me.

Regards

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by yellow1912

Is there anyway I can make the converted text read-able or at least "sizeable" on my kindle2? I used Savory and it could convert some pdf books that way, the problem with it is that it is too slow and often hang up on me.

Regards

Unfortunately not.

PDFRead results in just images; no text to be found. To enlarge those images to fit smaller ebook screens, you really need to cut up the .pdf page into halves or quarters and display horizontally (landscape) each of those sequentially.

This works best when there is a large white margin that can be removed, in which case, even vertical (portrait) images can be readable (but just barely).

[rachat024]

Well, nrapallo, your posts are great. They're very informative and helpful. You must be very good at this area. Many thanks for you.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by rachat024

Well, nrapallo, your posts are great. They're very informative and helpful. You must be very good at this area. Many thanks for you.

With over a hundred posts in this thread alone, you would think I do have something to say on this subject matter....

Thanks for the kind words and welcome to MobileRead.com! Do you have any particular ebook reader in mind?

[projectxz2005]

I'm just wondering whether it's possible to add minfilter5 to the source for pdfread when using the script on a Mac? The program is working but the output is different (and inferior) to when I run it on windows.
Also I'm wondering what method is used to chop out whitespace in PDFRead? Is there a way to do it in imagemagick for example?
And I'm using kindle2. Thanks for your work on this cool app.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by projectxz2005

I'm just wondering whether it's possible to add minfilter5 to the source for pdfread when using the script on a Mac? The program is working but the output is different (and inferior) to when I run it on windows

It should be very easy to do so, as the attachment pdfread-MinFilter5-mod-bin.zip contains both the modified python scripts and windows executable. You can disregard the windows binaries and library.zip and just copy over the .py python scripts.

This attachment can be found at the bottom of post #1 of this thread. Even though it says the EDIT: 14 Oct 2008 - for Sony users, it also is for all those that want to try the new minfilter5.

Just unzip that attachment and overwrite the files in the respective directories in your PDFRead install folder.

I keep the minfilter3 and minfilter5 files in two folders and overwrite the main files so as to switch between the two as necessary.

Have a go at it!

[sungeng1]

Hello,
Has somebody come up with a Kindle DX profile?

Thank you.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by sungeng1

Hello,
Has somebody come up with a Kindle DX profile?

Thank you.

Ya, good question!

Any ideas about an optimal Kindle DX profile...

p.s. the Kindle 2 profile has already been discussed here:
- https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...736#post419736
- https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...011#post428011

[projectxz2005]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

It should be very easy to do so, as the attachment pdfread-MinFilter5-mod-bin.zip contains both the modified python scripts and windows executable. You can disregard the windows binaries and library.zip and just copy over the .py python scripts.....

Cool. Thanks man! Alas I woke up this morning to a kindle 2 that doesn't turn on. Returning it tomorrow Just wondering about the whitespace removal feature of pdfread...Could you tell me some more about it? i gather it's native to the script as opposed to imagemagick?

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by projectxz2005

Cool. Thanks man! Alas I woke up this morning to a kindle 2 that doesn't turn on. Returning it tomorrow Just wondering about the whitespace removal feature of pdfread...Could you tell me some more about it? i gather it's native to the script as opposed to imagemagick?

Not much to tell, as I didn't write the code myself. It basically is a cropping mechanism which stops at the (almost) first non-white "dot" vertically and horizontally. The "almost" part recognizes that the crop percentage can move that cropping line a bit.

The python script, process.py, has two functions that accomplish it, namely:

crop

""" perform image cropping via whitespace detection """
def crop(input, percent=DEFAULT_CROP_PERCENT):
  p('CROP ')
  w, h = input.size
  img  = ImageChops.invert(input)
  box  = img.getbbox()
  if box is None:
    return None

  l, t, r, b = box

  # crop horizontal blank areas
  temp = crop_axis(input, img, t, b, percent,
                   lambda s, e: (0, s, w, e),
                   lambda s   : (w, s),
                   lambda s   : (0, s))

  w, h = temp.size
  img  = ImageChops.invert(temp)

  # crop vertical blank areas
  return crop_axis(temp, img, l, r, percent,
                   lambda s, e: (s, 0, e, h),
                   lambda s   : (s, h),
                   lambda s   : (s, 0))

and
crop_axis

""" internal function for cropping a single axis """
def crop_axis(input, img, start, end, percent,
              func_crop, func_size, func_pos):

  # compute optimal step and size for given axis percentage
  size = min(MAX_CROP_SIZE,  max(1, int((end-start)*percent/100)))
  step = min(MAX_CROP_STEP,  max(1, int(size/10)))

  content    = []
  begin      = start
  blank_area = False
  for i in range(start, end, step):
    test = img.crop( func_crop(i, i+size) )
    if test.getbbox() is None:
      if not blank_area:
        # we've hit a blank area, so save content area
        content.append( (begin, i) )
        blank_area = True
    else:
      if blank_area:
        # we've moved out of a blank area, mark beginning
        begin = i
        blank_area = False

  # handle the last leftover area
  if not blank_area and end > begin:
    content.append( (begin, end) )

  # create image with shrunken axis
  newI   = sum([last-first for first, last in content])
  output = Image.new(input.mode, func_size(newI), None)

  # append the content parts
  i = 0
  for first, last in content:
    output.paste( input.crop(func_crop(first, last)), func_pos(i) )
    i += (last - first)

  # return output
  return output

[dsip]

Hello!

I have stumpled upon a pdf where I get little squares at certain positions (in the output), which are not displayed in the original pdf.

It looks like this:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/att...1&d=1245613602

The pdf in question is this one:
http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/peopl...G_overview.pdf


I guess ghostscript lacks a sign here or something like that? Any recommendations on how to get rid of those? Because in some cases they seem to be at the same position as the following letter and the two kind of "merge", which is quite annoying.. (see the "General" in the attached image).

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by dsip

Hello!

I have stumpled upon a pdf where I get little squares at certain positions (in the output), which are not displayed in the original pdf.

It looks like this:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/att...1&d=1245613602

The pdf in question is this one:
http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/peopl...G_overview.pdf


I guess ghostscript lacks a sign here or something like that? Any recommendations on how to get rid of those? Because in some cases they seem to be at the same position as the following letter and the two kind of "merge", which is quite annoying.. (see the "General" in the attached image).

They look like a tab character. It may be that Ghostscript doesn't handle a tab correctly or recognize it, although that would be a stupid bug. Typically a square means that the character is not recognized. Often that is because it is missing from the font set being used and can be fixed by changing fonts but this looks like changing fonts won't help. I suspect you are stuck with it unless you can get the Ghostscript guys to fix their code or perhaps there is a later version. What does it look like in Adobe?

Dale