K2i and PDFs.

[JC71]

i,

Recent owner of a K2i, very happy with the choice,
so far in 2 weeks very stable and reasonable fast.
Contrast could be a little better, but since being using it mainly indoors at night maybe needs more light.

Bought it mainly to read PDF manuals (Cisco),
and for that given that it's a 6" device it is sufficient, but only after customizing the PDFs.
Reading mobi books it's very good, although for me the margins could be lessen.
Even manage to read some comics (cbz), the 16 grays and the full screen mode make it doable.


I would like to share how I customize my PDFs to the kindle.
Very cumbersome but for big PDFs is necessary.

Tools PDFill tools, SoPDF, ghostscript, imagemagick

1. [Optional] Create a lower mark above the footer.
Using the PDFill insert a footer "." centered, do not show page numbers and reduce the font size,
put it at 1.5" from bottom (adjust according to the pdf).
Idea is to create more uniform pages for SoPDF,
i.e. even if the page doesn't have text till the end of the page,
SoPDF will create 2 pages with more or less the same size aspect ratio.
Example if you have pages with slides and no text below the slide avoids cutting into half the slide.

2. Remove headers and footer
Again using PDFill crop the PDF, removing the headers and footers.
If you want to see the technical PDF in a 6" device, you can't afford to see headers and footers.

3. Print PDF
Since the crop doesn't really remove the headers/footers you have to print the file into a pdf.
That way the resulting pdf file won't have the hidden headers/footers.

4. Apply SoPDF

5. [Optional] Raster your SoPDF file
Sometimes SoPDF doesn't trim the pages very well,
also in the kindle while viewing PDFs it shows the pages info reducing the viewing area.
The kindle while showing images as a full screen mode,
which allows to make use of the entire screen 6" (600x800).
Using the imagemagick

convert -density 175 -limit memory 512mb -limit map 512mb -fuzz 10% -trim -scale 600x800 +dither -colorspace gray -colors 16 -normalize file_sopdf.pdf "a_%03d.png"

For big PDFs it's very memory and page swap hungry, I've seen reaching above 3G.
The resulting pngs files will have colorspace reduced and will be darker (normalize),
giving better contrast.

zip all files into a archive and rename it .cbz