PRC highlighting on K3 & DX

[pavelh]

Hi and thanks for reading my post!

I am choosing between Kindle 3 and DX for my first e-reader and there is one thing I need help with if I may bother someone, please:

I need to be able to highlight text that comes to me in PDFs but I don't have to use it as a PDF or output it as a PDF. Therefore my idea:

since there are problems with reflowing and DX's inability to highlight PDFs, I think I could convert PDFs to PRC format using Mobipocket Creator (a free utility). I have tried it on a very complex PDF (far more complex than what I am going to read) and this utility outputted a pretty good (not perfect, but good enough for me) version of the PDF file in PRC. I tried it in Kindle for PC and it reflows very, very nicely (I can change font size and the text reflows just like with a kindle book) and I can highlight text too.

Here comes my question: could it be so easy? Can I really just convert PDFs to PRCs and use highlighting on both K3 and DX? Or am I missing something crucial?

Many thanks in advance for any kind help!

Best regards,

PH

[susan_cassidy]

People do it all the time. Normally, these days, people use .mobi as the file extension, not .prc, but the same principle applies. Problems comes in with 2-column PDFs, or stuff with lots of tables and images. Also, occasionally you get a PDF that is just pictures of page (not a text-based PDF), and those don't convert.

[pavelh]

Many thanks for your kind reply! This is so important to me right now, you have no idea :-)
If I may, one more Q that just occurred to me, please: the PRC file (BTW quite a vulgar term in Czech, it is not going to be easy to use it here :-) - when I converted the PDF, the Kindle for PC displayed the PRC file with images (the appearance was: paragraphs of text, image, more text, another image, etc.) - will it display like this on K3, too, please? The reason I am asking this is that I kind of worry it may be stripped to bare text like in mobi (accidentally no meaning in Czech :-D

Many thanks again!

PH

[FF2]

There is apparently a viewer (sorry I don't have a link) that gives a pretty reasonable view of what a file would look like on the k3 - more accurate than the Kindle-4-pc application from what I have read. Now, I am not sure that you can really test it if you don't have a kindle-email address to send to for conversion and some folks say Calibre is not as good as the email conversion.

[pavelh]

Thanks for your reply. What you mean is probably called Kindle Previewer and you can get it from Amazon too. It is intended for developers and publishers. Truly you can select what kind of Kindle to display the text in. I would just like a confirmation that PRC files display with pictures. Although I admit that question may be foolish. I believed MOBI is text only and PRC is a kind of MOBI with images but I have just downloaded a made for Kindle Gutenberg book, which is MOBI and contains images. Oh well :-)

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by pavelh

I would just like a confirmation that PRC files display with pictures.

MobiPocket originally extended PalmDOC, which was mostly plain text, to add some HTML and images. These were packaged as .prc files (PalmDOC was usually .pdb). There were initially fairly severe restrictions on images in the PRC. Later on MobiPocket significantly updated the format - particularly for images. This is what we normally now call MOBI, although any version of the MobiPocket format can be in a .mobi or .prc file.

MobiPocket creator produces modern MOBI files and images in the ebook should be viewable om any Kindle.

[pavelh]

Wow, thank you!
:-)