"Best Practice" for PDF?

[new]

Why do you need to convert .pdf to .html? I am a newbie here so I don't understand this conversion processs. I have converted .pdf to .lrf and the TOC looks a mess, and some headings are a mess. But the book itself is readable. I use Calibre to change the font size to 12, so when I use Large on the reader it is a good size for me. Can you make your reader default to large? Or would it be better to change my font size to 16 or something, so I don't have to change each book to Large? Or will that mess the formatting up more?

Why does the formatting get messed up????

[Elfwreck]

The reason to convert to HTML, is so you can fix the formatting, remove page numbers & headers and so on, before converting it to a readable ebook format. Also, it's possible that PDF to LRF directly loses some of the formatting (bold, italics, centered text, etc.)

The formatting often gets very messed up if the original PDF had complex formatting, like tables, or multiple columns with pictures.

Sometimes, ordinary books like novels get scrambled when they go from PDF to other formats, because the formatting used to create the PDF was strange. (Like if the chapter headers are indented strangely, sometimes the paragraph following them isn't broken out on a new line. Or sometimes, every line of the book becomes a paragraph, which creates odd line breaks in other ebook versions.)

"Why" (or rather, "How, and how often?") depends on the program used to create the PDF.

If you're reading all your books at Large, it'd be better for you to just convert to a larger font size to begin with.

[new]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

If you're reading all your books at Large, it'd be better for you to just convert to a larger font size to begin with.

Thanks for the info. Does Calibre convert to .html? Someone mentioned opening it in Google email?

Also what size would be equivalent to Large if I had my font set for 12 pt.? Would that be maybe 18 pt.?

Thanks for the info.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

For an ebook reader, it's a mess.

I could read it on the PRS-505 without editing, but it'd involve some eyestrain. (If I loved the magazine, I'd read it that way.) It reflows the article text okay, but the formatting goes a bit crazy, especially for pages like the table of contents. (And often, the article text appears before the article headers.)

Aside from the fact that it's locked (which is easy to fix if you have the right software, and impossible otherwise), it's a nightmare to reformat. There's not enough whitespace around the edges to make much difference if it were cropped, and the columns aren't neatly organized in twos or threes; some pages have those, and some have text in squares, and some have text/picture combos that will be hard to convert to good ebook formats. Saving it as Word or HTML still winds up with weird line breaks and headers and footers mixed in with other content. Converting to other ebook formats would keep the scrambled text unless someone wanted to spend a couple of hours reformatting.

The only comfortable way to read such PDFS is on a computer or a large-screen device.

You could get usable text from that if you divided up the columns of the pages individually, which you could do either with PaperCrop or with the Full version of Adobe Acrobat. The problem is mainly that the pages are all different, so you'd have to do each page separately. I don't the problem would be quite as bad with a real article, where it's unlikely to switch column widths over and over again (it might do it on the first page from the rest or something like that). The images and charts that span columns would also need to be manually done. It would be a lot of work to get it in a useable form on a small reader, though it certainly could be done.

[Elfwreck]

I figured that page-by-page editing/cropping was almost as bad as reformatting in Word. You could do it for anyone issue of the magazine, but it wouldn't be worth the effort for a subscription. The idea of "every month you get your new issue, and it'll take between 30 minutes and 4 hours of careful formatting work before you can read it"... I'd certainly give up on any magazine arranged like that.

(For this one, I'd just deal with reading it on the 6" screen. But I like tiny fonts, and that wouldn't be nearly as much nuisance to me as reformatting.)

[tech_au]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I figured that page-by-page editing/cropping was almost as bad as reformatting in Word. You could do it for anyone issue of the magazine, but it wouldn't be worth the effort for a subscription. The idea of "every month you get your new issue, and it'll take between 30 minutes and 4 hours of careful formatting work before you can read it"... I'd certainly give up on any magazine arranged like that.

(For this one, I'd just deal with reading it on the 6" screen. But I like tiny fonts, and that wouldn't be nearly as much nuisance to me as reformatting.)

Thats how I feel about pdf conversion these days.When I first got the reader nearly a year ago I was keen to see if I could get good results from conversion but the effort is too time consuming so now If a quick run through mobi pocket creator then calibre yields a more readable file I'll put that onto the Sony reader but if its worse I put up with the pdf.

[frabjous]

Full page Magazines are probably the worst things to attempt to get into a useable form. I don't have too much trouble with most other forms of publications, even academic journals.