PDFRead 1.8.2 released!

[Barbayar]

Hi, It was helpful. Thank you very much.
I changed resolution to 480x622 and changed Line Spacing(Shift-Alt-1).

[daithi81]

My PDF>LRF conversions for PRS-505 tends to create portrait documents that are pushed to the left, with a big blank space to the right. Other than that, the formatting is great. How can I correct for this?

See attached.

[PinkBlythe]

I haven't read the whole thread, just in case nobody on a Mac mentioned it before: The app runs smoothly on a Macbook/Snow Leopard using Crossover (a Wine app which makes it possible to run some Windows programms without a Windows installation)

It takes only slightly longer than running it on a windows machine, 10 pages took 50 minutes to convert.

May be of use for those Macusers out there who don't want to copy a lot of files to get it to work.

The output is a lot better than it is using Calibre (at least for the pdfs I tried)

[farial]

When i create a new pcr file using PDF reader most of the time i cant move them to the kindle document folder.....

...it says the archive is not there anymore (but it is, i can cleary see it in my desktop) its some kind of pathing issue, it starts to upload then it suddenly stops and give the error msg. The archive is even created in the kindle folder (but is incompletely transfered) i am using windows vista. Also vista keeps cheking kindle memory for erros (similar to what you would get when wrongly removing a pendrive)


I can move pcr files into kindle with no problem if they are created by other programs (like Mobipocket creator)

No idea whats happening... please help!

Edit: The msg I got is : "error 0x800703EE";

I had also a little program called ninja pendisk running (virus scan for pen drives that kicks in automatically and may try to write into kindle perhaps? trying to immunize it...), but when I disable it, nothing changed.

When i tried to download a prc book from this site and move it to my kindle the same problem happened....

[larryy]

Originally Posted by PinkBlythe

I haven't read the whole thread, just in case nobody on a Mac mentioned it before: The app runs smoothly on a Macbook/Snow Leopard using Crossover (a Wine app which makes it possible to run some Windows programms without a Windows installation)

It takes only slightly longer than running it on a windows machine, 10 pages took 50 minutes to convert.

May be of use for those Macusers out there who don't want to copy a lot of files to get it to work.

The output is a lot better than it is using Calibre (at least for the pdfs I tried)

I'd started using PDFRead from the command line on Mac OS X, but given this comment I tried Crossover, as I thought it might be nice to be able to run it with a GUI. But it's not working for me. Crossover (8.0.1) seemed to install just fine on my MacBook Pro running 10.5.8. I used Crossover to run the PDFRead 1.8.2 installer apparently successfully. But when I run PDFRead all I ever get when I click the "Convert" button is "Please enter the conversion details", and no converted file. My settings are shown in the image inserted below. I started with more default settings and no options specified for unpaper, but gradually set some value for every field in the GUI, all to no avail. Any idea what's going on?

[larryy]

Back on the command-line, I've been experimenting with all the parameter settings, and as best I can tell I cannot coax pdfread into generating the output mode I'd like. Is there any way to get pdfread to carve up 2-column articles so that each piece of a column is displayed in landscape mode? I had hopes that landscape-2col might do this, but it doesn't. I guess I'm looking for something like landscape-2col-third.

The intention is to turn 2-column files into landscape-oriented chunks, the way portrait-2col does for portrait view, so the text will be larger and more readable. (Old eyes, I'm afraid.) So the page would be broken up something like this:

___ ___
|_1_|_4_|
|_2_|_5_|
|_3_|_6_|

And, actually, I don't care how many chunks a column is broken up into. I just want the maximum screen real estate used for each chunk. If it needs to break the page into 8 chunks instead of 6, that's fine. What matters is that the page be split in the middle, and each chunk use maximum display, umm, width when turned on its side, height when held normally... maximum landscape width, if that's a good way to describe it.

Is this possible?

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by larryy

I'd started using PDFRead from the command line on Mac OS X, but given this comment I tried Crossover, as I thought it might be nice to be able to run it with a GUI. But it's not working for me. Crossover (8.0.1) seemed to install just fine on my MacBook Pro running 10.5.8. I used Crossover to run the PDFRead 1.8.2 installer apparently successfully. But when I run PDFRead all I ever get when I click the "Convert" button is "Please enter the conversion details", and no converted file. My settings are shown in the image inserted below. I started with more default settings and no options specified for unpaper, but gradually set some value for every field in the GUI, all to no avail. Any idea what's going on?

If the GUI installer finished okay, then perhaps the GUI cannot locate the dos command to launch the dos pdfread.exe executable. The GUI is just a front-end to send command line parameters to pdfread.exe. The behaviour you describe may result from that.

The PDFRead GUI assumes it "knows" where the install directory is and launches the batch file, "C:\Program Files\PDFRead\pdfread-run.cmd" (again heavy dose of dos here!!!!) Usually, pdfread.exe will reside in "C:\Program Files\PDFRead\bin". If the NSIS GUI is functional in MAC OS X, then that's what could be thwarting your successful launches.

Another thing to try would be to NOT enter any Output info and just let the GUI place the output in the same directory as the input. Worth a shot.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by larryy

Is this possible?

Yes.










Will it get implemented? ...probably not! The code written by the original author actually could handle splitting images into a M x N grid, but unfortunatley the code is not very smart about finding the center "between" the columns, so it would probably NOT work as expected for most conversions that are asymmetrical.

Here's a thought: Separately, try splitting the "two" columns first into a skinny one column .pdf (or images then to .pdf) then feed that resulting .pdf into PDFRead and use layout-mode: landscape (not landscape-third!). What this will do is max. out the width and then produce as many landscape strips as required to finish that page. It could be two, three, four or more...

[kevindorsey]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

Yes.










Will it get implemented? ...probably not! The code written by the original author actually could handle splitting images into a M x N grid, but unfortunatley the code is not very smart about finding the center "between" the columns, so it would probably NOT work as expected for most conversions that are asymmetrical.

Here's a thought: Separately, try splitting the "two" columns first into a skinny one column .pdf (or images then to .pdf) then feed that resulting .pdf into PDFRead and use layout-mode: landscape (not landscape-third!). What this will do is max. out the width and then produce as many landscape strips as required to finish that page. It could be two, three, four or more...

May be some other developer/coder can pick this up and refine the project?

[nrapallo]

This thread, for PDFRead v1.8.2, has just reached some major milestones, that is, it's been viewed over 100,000 instances and it's main installer in post #1 has been downloaded over 10,000 times.

It's a nice 10:1 ratio akin to Patrica's Karma to Post count.

Not too many other threads here seem to have hit home with users as much!!!

[sameerkhan]

I am trying to convert a pdf file to kindle format, and I get this error on every page conversion.

I started getting this problem after I killed one of the conversion process half way.

Any idea what I should do, I uninstalled/re-installed the app and the ebook publisher, that didn't help

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by sameerkhan

I am trying to convert a pdf file to kindle format, and I get this error on every page conversion.

I started getting this problem after I killed one of the conversion process half way.

Any idea what I should do, I uninstalled/re-installed the app and the ebook publisher, that didn't help

I have never had this happen, but can only think that your executable is somehow corrupt and NOT being deleted when you uninstall the program.

Try uninstalling again and make sure that the entire PDFRead folder is deleted. If not, manually do so. Also, clear your temp files folder, cache, prefetch for gs.exe, etc...

Also, search your path(s) for all instances gs.exe and ensure the one in the PDFRead folder is the 'first' one.

I'm guessing at a solution, but when nothing works, try everything.

[julker]

Hi, first off, thanks for sharing this great program with us. Great job.

I have tried and succesfully converted PDF files for Kindle format .prc. I have one question tho. Files are usually bigger then its original format (almost 10 times). Is that normal? and if so what can I do to make it smaller. Any settings that I have overlooked perhaps?

Thanks

Jack

[=X=]

Originally Posted by julker

Hi, first off, thanks for sharing this great program with us. Great job.

I have tried and succesfully converted PDF files for Kindle format .prc. I have one question tho. Files are usually bigger then its original format (almost 10 times). Is that normal? and if so what can I do to make it smaller. Any settings that I have overlooked perhaps?

Thanks

Jack

The Kindle 2 supports PDF, is the PDF too complex for the Kindle?

No there is not setting you can chose to make the file size smaller. What this app does is turn the PDF text into an image, then optimizes the image for a 6" screen. Ths entails cropping of the margins, and dialating the fonts.

But because the final product takes text to an image the file size is increased. You also lose all text base benefits, like search and dictionary lookup.

I'd recommend you try soPDF first, then, if the PDF is still unreadable, try this tool as a second effort. soPDF(link) (found here in mobiread). This tool crops the margins off the PDF while keeping the final product as a text base PDF. Most PDF after running soPDF are usually smaller in footprint size.

=X=

[julker]

Originally Posted by =X=

The Kindle 2 supports PDF, is the PDF too complex for the Kindle?

No there is not setting you can chose to make the file size smaller. What this app does is turn the PDF text into an image, then optimizes the image for a 6" screen. Ths entails cropping of the margins, and dialating the fonts.

But because the final product takes text to an image the file size is increased. You also lose all text base benefits, like search and dictionary lookup.

I'd recommend you try soPDF first, then, if the PDF is still unreadable, try this tool as a second effort. soPDF(link) (found here in mobiread). This tool crops the margins off the PDF while keeping the final product as a text base PDF. Most PDF after running soPDF are usually smaller in footprint size.

=X=

Hi, Thanks for the quick reply. So I did not realize that I could do that with Kindle. Since I am contemplating getting one, I was using Mobipocket Reader to see if my documents will show up properly. I was converting them first then see if they display properly.

Thank you so much.

Jack