Hi

Crook · 04-14-2008, 11:51 AM

Hi,

I've had a PRS 500 for quite a while now, but there have been a few niggling problems with it. I mainly read books in RTF, but I have a few PDF's and LIT's around. I found the conversion tools a bit lacking (or maybe I didn't search well enough) so I've started to write my own.

The problems I've encountered so far are:

some LIT's (converted to .txt) have page numbers embedded in them, and these quite annoyingly happen at the end of a 'page', splitting the line.

Some PDF's (when saved to .txt) are simply a line by line save, with each line being ended with a character return!

When saved as RTF, Word gives the author's name as my name, and this is carried over into my PRS 500

So, my little app does a few things:

Searches for odd 'numbered' page breaks and erases them, rejoining chopped lines

Searches for character return ended lines and removes them when appropriate. It finds paragraphs and adds the lines together to make one correct paragraph. It tries to leave some lines alone (lines of a certain minimum length)

It also can read in the metadata of Author and Title from an RTF file and allow you to edit them easily.

My workflow is as follows:

Get your book in .TXT format, however you can (ABC lit converter, save from PDF etc(

Run it through my app.

Open it up in word and format the title correctly, change font to Arial size 20 (looks good on the PRS) and justify the main text. Save as RTF.

Check the RTF title and author in my app and change if necessary

Import into Connect reader and move to PRS.

This is written in VB, so you'll probably have to be running XP SP2 or Vista for it to work properly, and then maybe need the .NET framework. Other than that I don't know if it'll be useful to many others but It's been useful to me over the last couple of days. Any comments or improvements to make would be welcome.

pilotbob · 04-14-2008, 11:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crook

I've had a PRS 500 for quite a while now, but there have been a few niggling problems with it. I mainly read books in RTF, but I have a few PDF's and LIT's around. I found the conversion tools a bit lacking (or maybe I didn't search well enough) so I've started to write my own.

You might want to work with Kovid on libprs500 rather than starting from scratch on your own stuff. Kovid's LIT to LRF works perfectly. (At least for me so far.) Yes, PDF to any eBook reader format has been the elephant in the room... there's just no "perfect" way to do it so far.

BOb

Crook · 04-14-2008, 02:24 PM

I'll let Kovid do his own thing. Most of the fun was in the writing of it anyway

There's work to be done on the cleanup of TXT when exported from a PDF. What I have is readable so far but there's more I can do. I guess most are now reading LRF's on their readers?

The really annoying thing was the Author and Title embedded in the RTF's. I did have a method ages ago but that entailed hex editing all kinds of files - at least now it's eay for me.

pilotbob · 04-14-2008, 02:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crook

I'll let Kovid do his own thing. Most of the fun was in the writing of it anyway

There's work to be done on the cleanup of TXT when exported from a PDF. What I have is readable so far but there's more I can do. I guess most are now reading LRF's on their readers?

The really annoying thing was the Author and Title embedded in the RTF's. I did have a method ages ago but that entailed hex editing all kinds of files - at least now it's eay for me.

Personally I prefer to convert stuff to LRF if I can. Generally comming from LIT it works out very well. The Sony seems very happy displaying the LRF files.

BOb

Crook · 04-14-2008, 04:01 PM

I'm coming across problems with converting from PDF - things like the text headers being put in between sentences that roll over one page into the next. I've fixed those in this new version. Obviously any pdf -> txt -> rtf is going to have its fair share of problems - not the least of which is losing any sort of formatting like italics/bold etc. But for straight books it seems to work for me at the moment with the books I'm reading.

I may try to do a rewrite based on the RTF file format to preserve formatting....

04-14-2008, 02:24 PM	#3
Crook Junior Member Posts: 4 Karma: 10 Join Date: Apr 2008 Device: Sony PRS 500	I'll let Kovid do his own thing. Most of the fun was in the writing of it anyway There's work to be done on the cleanup of TXT when exported from a PDF. What I have is readable so far but there's more I can do. I guess most are now reading LRF's on their readers? The really annoying thing was the Author and Title embedded in the RTF's. I did have a method ages ago but that entailed hex editing all kinds of files - at least now it's eay for me.

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