creating screen shot of each page

[JiYu]

Hi,

I created a mobi book for my kindle3. Unfortunately DTP is not supporting Japanese and now I was thinking to create a screen shot from each page like it is shown on the device. My problem is that the formatting is only shown properly on the device (or some emulator?).

Is it possible to create screen shots on the kindle3 device or some simulator?

Thanks!

JiYu

[FF2]

Alt-Shift-G - Take a screenshot of the currently displayed screen. A .GIF file will be created in the \documents folder (plug the device in to your computer to access).

[DreamWriter]

A related question.... Do you know of any way to take a .jpg screenshot on the Kindle? The .gif doesn't resize very well for me.

I used my scanner to take a screenshot of the device and saved it as .jpg. The results are acceptable, but some clarity is lost. Since this photo is on our web site to show how text looks in the PDF version of our book as viewed on a 6-inch eReader screen, the picture quality is important. I'd love to know if there's another (better) way.

[curstpriest]

@ OP: DTP? Don't know what that is...
I'm assuming you mean this: you made a book with japanese characters and put it in a .mobi, but the kindle can't display it properly, you probably just see a ton of squares or ? marks.

If the characters won't show up on kindle in .mobi package, just package them in a PDF and they will show up properly, don't use an image based PDF, unless you really have to. I don't know tons about PDF but I know it supports japanese text, and the kindle should be able to display that.

Also use a really small paper size or it will look like crap on a K3, use something tiny like, 3x4 inches with size 10-12 font. You can try changing stuff from there. Other people may know more about font sizes/paper sizes for K3, I don't because I don't have one.

If you MUST have a PDF as a solid IMAGE, you can easily convert your document into an image like so:

Get a program that installs a PDF printer driver such as:
Acrobat 9 Pro (costs alot, gives you print to "Adobe PDF")
PDFcreator (free, gives you print to "PDF Creator")

Open your document in Acrobat 9 - go to print - select the print to PDF driver - chose paper size by PDF size (shouldn't be letter/a4) - then go to advanced, and select "PRINT AS IMAGE"

Then go to print, and it should ask you to save a file, or pop up a configuration dialoge.. Make sure the image quality settings are acceptable (you don't want some low quality crap, but you don't need something over the top wasting space. If you are smart you can pick a reasonable compression to make the file-size small and loss-less.

@ DreamWriter: Anyways, using a scanner/working with jpegs? Also makes no sense, if you are using any photo/image editing software that is worth anything (i'm assuming you arn't using MS PAINT) - get photoshop or one of the free versions packaged with software that is more limited, if you don't have that, get GIMP (it's free). GIF images should resize fine, but you may have some trouble with filters/some operations, so just switch it from indexed color mode to RGB and you are good to do whatever you want with it.

[DMSmillie]

@curstpriest : DTP = "Digital Text Platform" = Amazon's web interface for self-publishing ebooks for Kindle (http://dtp.amazon.com).

@JiYu : You could try using the Kindle Previewer (available for download from http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm...cId=1000234621) which simulates what a MOBI ebook will look like on a Kindle, and simply take screen shots. That will be a lot of work though.

I'm a bit unclear on what you want to do with the screen shots. If Japanese isn't yet a supported language on DTP, it doesn't matter if the ebook consists of actual text or images of text - it still won't be accepted by Amazon for publication in the Kindle store.

[DreamWriter]

Originally Posted by curstpriest

@ DreamWriter: Anyways, using a scanner/working with jpegs? Also makes no sense, if you are using any photo/image editing software that is worth anything (i'm assuming you arn't using MS PAINT) - get photoshop or one of the free versions packaged with software that is more limited, if you don't have that, get GIMP (it's free). GIF images should resize fine, but you may have some trouble with filters/some operations, so just switch it from indexed color mode to RGB and you are good to do whatever you want with it.

Thanks for your assistance. I was able to resize the Kindle-produced GIF and get an acceptable result.

The text in the resized GIF doesn't look any better than the scanner-produced JPG, but I'll be using the GIF since the screen color/contrast is more pleasing than the scanner JPG. The GIF file size is also a bit smaller.

[JiYu]

Hi,

yeah the thing is the Kindle supports Japanese and it looks really great, but DTP is not supporting it. I thought that it would be may be possible to trick a little bit and make pictures and then upload to DTP. But like @DMSmillie mentioned it probably will not pass the check of DTP.

I think the easiest and most correct way is to wait until DTP supports Japanese and in the meanwhile I will publish my books on other platforms.

[DMSmillie]

I'm sorry JiYu. I wondered if you had something like that in mind. Something else to consider, though - quite apart from the fact that you wouldn't be able to set the correct language for the book in the DTP settings - is that different devices have different screen sizes and shapes, so trying to use images of the book as it looks on, for example, a Kindle 3, could look strange if it was viewed on a Kindle DX, or on the Kindle for iPad app, for example.

[curstpriest]

call them and tell them that their QA is broken and ask for a workaround