Reading comics on Kindle 3

[Darkitow]

Hi there! I've seen many posts about this matter before but they're old or don't answer my question.

I've been looking for a way to put some mangas in my Kindle for some days, at first I tried tweaking the pages with Mangle, but that didn't help much. The page's height is a bit longer in proportion compared to the Kindle's screen, so when I use Mangle, it reduces the page a lot and fills the sides with white space.

In my second attemp, I manually resized a page only for the width (so it ended 800x956 or around). My idea was to fir the page by width in the screen, so I would only need to scroll down a bit to read the whole page. Sadly, Kindle's image viewer seems to fir the whole page in the screen so at the end it was the same than with mangle (but taking more time to load): the page went too small with a lot of white space at the sides.

Finally I tried to put a couple pages in a PDF and see what would happen, but that didn't help too.

Is there a way to do what I want? The idea would be as I mentioned in my second attemp: a viewer that fits the page by width and to read the lower part of the page you would only need to scroll down a bit. I'd be really happy to find a way to do this because I have a ton of mangas in my computer and reading them in my Kindle would be awesome.

[AkumaTakeshi]

I didn't try any Manga to kindle converter yet (Mangle, Mangize) but the way I do it is just reading them on Duokan, which is a alternative firmware for Kindle. It's much better for Manga and PDFs.

I works good with the mangareader site, without doing anything to the images.

Hope it helps.

[Darkitow]

If possible I wouldn't like to kill the original firmware because I like it and I've already installed many hacks, apart from that I read many more books than mangas, so I'd prefer to keep it that way.

If there isn't a hack or something ike that that would let me read them on a chosen size, isn't there an "alternate way"? Like for example making a real book (like a pdb file) with the pictures inside.

[AkumaTakeshi]

I don't know about hacks to do it, maybe someone show up that can head you that way. But as for Duokan you still keep the original firmware. Your Kindle will have a dualboot, you can choose which one you want to load but normally Duokan stays as default if you don't choose any of them when you turn on Kindle.

But in Duokan you can quickly change to Kindle original firmware. And if you don't like it you can just delete all the files regarding Duokan and it's done, or uninstall it from the menu.

The way I do it is, I restart Kindle and leave it there by itself, 5 of so minutes later is starting Duokan, when I don't need it anymore I just go to the Settings menu of Duokan and there is a option to switch to original firmware, and it's done.

BTW you can read novels in Duokan too, but only without DRM, it can also read EPUB. And it organizes stuff with folders instead of collections.

Well that's my 2 cents

[Darkitow]

How does Duokan handle the size of the pictures?

For example, as I said, my problem is that Kindle zooms out to fit the whole page on the screen. So, if the page is proportionaly longer than the screen it fits it to height and leaves a blank space at the sides, while if the picture is proportionally wider, it fits it with blank spaces on top and bottom.

The only thing I want is a way to show the picture at 100% size, so if I have a page that is 600x900, it will be perfectly fitted by width, and it will "cut" it a bit at the top and/or bottom, so I only need to scroll the picture up and down to see the whole page.

So, short version: is there a way to make kindle (with Duokan or any other way) show a picture at 100% size by default, without zooming it out, in case the picture is bigger than the screen?

[AkumaTakeshi]

I think it automatically resizes it to fit the screen and then you can fit by height, width or both, the later normally does the same as fit width. You have reading modes too, where you can divide the page in half vertically and I as far as I remember you can read it in 4 blocks too and select the direction of the reading.

I think you should just try for yourself and see if it suits you. It's not really difficult.

[sil]

You could always resize the images that make up the manga. ImageMagick is easy to use (and free) to batch process. Actually isn't this what mangle does as part of its conversion process (ie when you select the device it will resize each image to fit the screen resolution and bitdepth)? I think the K3 though still pads some borders with its normal margin (I think top/bottom get more margin too). Anyway, zip up the images, rename *.zip to *.cbz and Calibre can convert that to a mobi if you want. I'm not sure what the exact ideal pixel dimensions are for the images so that the kindle doesn't do any scaling, but it will change with how you've set up your device margin settings. I've never used the file browser in my K3 so I don't know if the margin settings effect that or not.

[Darkitow]

the problem to that is what I mentioned earlier, Mangle resizes the page so it fits all in the screen, so if your page is proportionally wider or higher than the K3 screen, it will reduce it even more adding extra blank space, and then it's impossible to read the letters.

[sil]

Maybe you misunderstood what I meant. By "Resize" I'm referring to changing the size of the comic pages by X amount for height and Y amount for width so it fits the whole screen perfectly, top to bottom and side to side. The change in aspect ratio is small and doesn't distort the comics much (you really wouldn't notice it, unless you have a square comic and resized to the rectangular screen). It's just an option you could try, and generally using an image processing application the scaling is handled better than letting the screen do it. Still the K3 screen is only just big enough for comics, so sometimes I've had to look close to try to make out some text (usually if there's a *note in a comic panel its written a little smaller than narrative or dialogue text).

Batch processing images you might also be able to crop some of the comic if there is empty margin space you can get rid of. This will help use as much of the screens pixels as possible for the actual comic.

I have noticed though that the K3 seems to have its own empty borders which are different top & bottom to the sides and the margin setting in the config file (or can be set through Calibre) is a single value applied all around. So there will still be some white space I don't think can be removed top/bottom (these areas might be reserved for room for the menus etc). So maybe that's what you're seeing too.

Sorry I can't suggest anything better for you.

[Zenbaas]

Hi
I registered pretty much just to reply to this thread. I recently bought a Kindle and I've had exactly the same problem with all the extra white space. I found a program called Mangize (just google it) which removes almost all of the extra white space and makes it look a ton better on my DX as well as my wifes Kindle 3. Hope this helps if you haven't already found a better way