Kindle 3 Transfer PDF

[tomsem]

I find I'm using PDF more on my K3 than K2. Although the PDF support is very similar, the contrast adjustment of K3 is helpful in making text more readable, and it is nice to be able to highlight and annotate (though these annotations are not portable to other PDF readers).

I have also discovered Cropping. This allows pages to be trimmed down so they display better in fit-to-screen portrait mode. For example, usually there are headers and footers and wide margins that can be trimmed off (Kindle displays the PDF page number labels so navigation is no problem) so that text can be larger. The text can be quite small, but I find it readable in most cases. Cropping also improves usability in landscape mode. There are a number of free tools that can do cropping (on Mac, the Preview app is able to do it).

Occasionally Kindle will cut off the bottom of the page in fit-to-screen (portrait) mode, and you have to zoom or switch to landscape to see it. But that happens only every 20 pages or so and with some PDFs not at all.

I find that PDF conversion almost never works to my satisfaction, so I'd much rather view it with the original layout.

The one feature I would like to see them add is support for PDF links (for TOC etc.).

[Uri]

The PDF reader is more of a curiosity than an actual feature. Do not buy a non-DX Kindle with the intention of reading PDFs, I assure you that you'll be bitterly disappointed.

Some publishers offer native Kindle versions of programming books, like these:
http://oreilly.com/ebooks/
http://www.pragprog.com/titles
Both offer DRM-free ebooks, and you can download both the Kindle version and the full-size PDF.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Uri

The PDF reader is more of a curiosity than an actual feature. Do not buy a non-DX Kindle with the intention of reading PDFs, I assure you that you'll be bitterly disappointed.

Originally Posted by tomsem

I find I'm using PDF more on my K3 than K2. Although the PDF support is very similar, the contrast adjustment of K3 is helpful in making text more readable, and it is nice to be able to highlight and annotate (though these annotations are not portable to other PDF readers).

I have also discovered Cropping. This allows pages to be trimmed down so they display better in fit-to-screen portrait mode. For example, usually there are headers and footers and wide margins that can be trimmed off (Kindle displays the PDF page number labels so navigation is no problem) so that text can be larger. The text can be quite small, but I find it readable in most cases. Cropping also improves usability in landscape mode. There are a number of free tools that can do cropping (on Mac, the Preview app is able to do it).

Occasionally Kindle will cut off the bottom of the page in fit-to-screen (portrait) mode, and you have to zoom or switch to landscape to see it. But that happens only every 20 pages or so and with some PDFs not at all.
.

Have you tried reading pdf's in landscape mode? Makes a world of difference, as the manual says.

[diokdin]

PDF on Kindle sucks. No reflow and very awkward to read even a straight novel. You have to zoom then pan around. Instead of being immersed in the book, you get very distracted of paning around just to read the story. So no, don't recommend reading a pdf file on Kindle.

My Astak EZ Reader is much better in reflowing pdf files.

But there is Calibre to convert your pdf to mobi so it's doable. I just don't know about ebooks that has graphs and such. Mine is purely for reading fiction novels.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by diokdin

PDF on Kindle sucks. No reflow and very awkward to read even a straight novel. You have to zoom then pan around. Instead of being immersed in the book, you get very distracted of paning around just to read the story. So no, don't recommend reading a pdf file on Kindle.

My Astak EZ Reader is much better in reflowing pdf files.

But there is Calibre to convert your pdf to mobi so it's doable. I just don't know about ebooks that has graphs and such. Mine is purely for reading fiction novels.

Again. converting pdf's to mobi doesn't always work.

However, reading pdf novels in landscape mode gives you a perfect format.

[aquawater]

For fiction novel, i.e. epub format, I am kinda happy with iPhone + iBooks.
I have tried reading classic like "A Study in Scarlet" and the swiping experience is wonderful. I bet I should look for other device to read my PDF...

[diokdin]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Again. converting pdf's to mobi doesn't always work.

However, reading pdf novels in landscape mode gives you a perfect format.

Tried landscape mode, I still need to pan around from side to side, so nope. If the novel doesn't convert to mobi well in Calibre, I'll just make it a text file it reads really good as a text file than pdf. But that's just novels though. Haven't tried pdf with graphs and tables.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by diokdin

PDF on Kindle sucks. No reflow and very awkward to read even a straight novel. You have to zoom then pan around. Instead of being immersed in the book, you get very distracted of paning around just to read the story. So no, don't recommend reading a pdf file on Kindle.

My Astak EZ Reader is much better in reflowing pdf files.

But there is Calibre to convert your pdf to mobi so it's doable. I just don't know about ebooks that has graphs and such. Mine is purely for reading fiction novels.

Conversion, and reflow, is a crap shoot (for much the same reasons: many PDFs are not tagged to define reading order, structure, etc.). It only takes a couple of minutes to crop most PDFs so they are readable in their original layout, provided you can tolerate small text and don't mind if the headers/footers are missing (Kindle shows PDF page numbers so having headers or footers with the same information is a waste of space).

And reading in landscape mode is not bad either since it automatically crops whitespace.

I'd like to have reflow as an option as well, but I'm pretty happy even without it.

[ricsmania]

Originally Posted by aquawater

Thanks everyone for the reply.
IMHO, PDF reflow will mess up pdf books with programming codes, and tables-like structure.. Unfortunately there is no sample hardware to try.
And I am not in US, hence I am not sure about 30 days return policy. Does it still apply for non-US customers?



Ricsmania, thanks for the offer. There are some PDF sample available here.
Could you post some screenshots for these books.
WPF 4 Unleashed, any page with text, or page 8 in chapter 1 sample.

jQuery in Action, Second Edition in particular, Chapter 1, page 10, 11, 12 (those with codes and tables). Chapter 9, page 11.

Here you go.

In portrait mode it's a big small, but perfectly readable IMO. Of course you can always use landscape if you want.

Hope this helped. Don't know if I got all the page rights, I don't know if you were mentioning the PDF page or the printed page number, so if there is any other page you need please tell me.



]

[aquawater]

Fantastic, ricsmania..
I am kinda agree with you.. It's still readable.

Could you try with this book also, page 10 and 11. There are combination of code, picture and graph. Would be great if readable.
http://apress.com/book/downloadfile/4284

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Uri

The PDF reader is more of a curiosity than an actual feature. Do not buy a non-DX Kindle with the intention of reading PDFs, I assure you that you'll be bitterly disappointed.

Some publishers offer native Kindle versions of programming books, like these:
http://oreilly.com/ebooks/
http://www.pragprog.com/titles
Both offer DRM-free ebooks, and you can download both the Kindle version and the full-size PDF.

I disagree with the 'bitterly disappointed' characterization. PDF on 6" kindle is quite usable for a lot of material, especially if you are prepared to crop the headers/footers/margins. And at least as it stands, DX is missing some useful PDF features (contrast adjustment, annotation/highlighting). Far from being bitterly disappointed, I'm quite happy to have saved $240 dollars for a much more portable device. But YMMV.

See attached examples (one from an O'Reilly PDF, the other from Apple developer documentation).

[Vitel]

Hi everyone!
This is my first post here and I will get straight to the point.
As a soon-to-be Kindle owner (first time) I am also very curious about the possibility to read complex pdfs on a 6" device. I was seriously considering buying a 9-inch DX, because most of my texts are tech docs, etc. but suddenly remembered that I am a sofware developer and maybe I can find a workaround.
First of all I reviewed the existing conversion sofware and was disappointed to find no good program to reflow technical pdfs. So I decided to create my own piece of software for that purpose. I have some preliminary results, but it's a lot of hard work and I also have a job and it is difficult to split my time between these projects.
There are a lot of things that have to be done like region, line, and word detection, de-hyphenation, picture detection and resizing, stripping column titles, etc. Not to mention rebuilding output pages. However, roughly half of those have been solved and the results are quite promising. The output is all graphical, so footnotes and search won't work, but at least you will be able to read something with normal sized font (hopefully).
I am expecting my Kindle 3 to arrive next week and I will continue to work on that little program if nothing interferes.
If you have samples of pdfs or pages, please post some (links) here so that I can feed it into my proggy and see how it handles them.

[aquawater]

Originally Posted by Vitel

Hi everyone!
First of all I reviewed the existing conversion sofware and was disappointed to find no good program to reflow technical pdfs. So I decided to create my own piece of software for that purpose. I have some preliminary results, but it's a lot of hard work and I also have a job and it is difficult to split my time between these projects.
There are a lot of things that have to be done like region, line, and word detection, de-hyphenation, picture detection and resizing, stripping column titles, etc. Not to mention rebuilding output pages. However, roughly half of those have been solved and the results are quite promising. The output is all graphical, so footnotes and search won't work, but at least you will be able to read something with normal sized font (hopefully).
I am expecting my Kindle 3 to arrive next week and I will continue to work on that little program if nothing interferes.

Great.. your work will greatly help IT bookworm !!

[desertgrandma]

@aquawater

I know this is totally irrelevant now, but I want you to know I finally took a 'screenshot' of page 7.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by Vitel

Hi everyone!
This is my first post here and I will get straight to the point.

Welcome to MobileRead, Vitel.

Thanks for your help!