PRS-T2 PDF page numbers

[David Fitz]

Hi guys, just joined the forum. I just bought a PRS-T2 to replace my Kindle. I'm loving the reflow which works really well even with OCRed pdfs. The only problem is that the page numbers displayed by the reader correspond to the actual number of pages in the document, rather than the allocated page numbers. So whereas numbers in the printed book start with roman numerals and then turn to standard numbering from the introduction onwards, the reader just displays e.g. page 6 of 150. This is not a big problem with pdfs that have a table of contents, but a nightmare for those without, where I rely on the page numbers listed on the actual contents page. Anyone know if this can be remedied?

Also, is it possible to have a progress bar for reading, or am I just trying to make my Sony Reader into the Kindle that it is not?

Finally, is it possible to have reflow justified rather than left-aligned?

Cheers,
David

[Agama]

Welcome to MobileRead.

PDFs are designed on a fixed layout and the page numbers are part of the text of the page and therefore get rendered as such on eReaders. Sony's PDF reflow mode is helpful but cannot eliminate these hard-coded page numbers.

You could try converting to ePub which can allow you to strip out PDF page headers/footers, (which typically includes these page numbers). If the PDF is quite simple this can work well, but generally PDF to ePub conversions need some manually post-conversion editing to complete the job.

I haven't seen a justification option for the reflow mode but this is something else that could be achieved by conversion to ePub.

[David Fitz]

Hi Agama, thanks for the quick reply. I think you may have misunderstood my post though. If you open a PDF on Acrobat you can number the pages however you like. These numbers are embedded in the pdf. They need not correspond to the actual position of the page. So the 8th page might be numbered 'xiii' and the ninth page might be '1'. On the kindle, the page number displayed for a pdf would be 'page xiii' followed by 'page 1'. On the sony reader, my PDFs seem to display 'page 8' followed by 'page 9'. In other words, it ignores the embedded page numbers. The problem is that the table of contents in a book obviously lists the page numbers as printed, which correspond to the embedded numbers. If I enter the page number to navigate to on the Sony Reader I get to the wrong page because it ignores the embedded numbers. This does not occur with proper bookmarks, but these are not present in many of the scanned documents that I use.

As for converting to ePub, I have had little success. I have found the reflow option on the PRS T2 to be far superior to the results of converted epubs.

[Agama]

The Sony numbers the pages from 1, irrespective of what is on the PDF page. Maybe Kindle has the edge over Sony here. (Does it reflow PDFs?). Using a toc with links to your chapters/sections would work in ePub without any need to refer to fixed page numbers, hence my suggestion of trying a conversion. Novels convert quite well from PDF but more complicated books are not so good.

I have encountered the same problem with roman numeral pages before the main text and the only fixes were to convert to ePub or renumber pages from 1 in Acrobat.

[David Fitz]

Having used both, the Sony reader destroys the kindle on text-based pdfs simply because it has reflow, and good reflow at that. However, viewing pdfs on the kindle in landscape mode is much better than on the sony reader, which struggles with cropping and margins. Kindle also takes the edge with page numbers as mentioned. It's annoying that the sony could not take the best features of the kindle regarding pdfs. At the end of the day, reflow makes all of the other sacrifices worthwhile imo.

[Agama]

I certainly appreciate Sony's reflow mode as well. (It also crops out the PDF margin which so many PDFs seem to have.) The page number issue doesn't bother me too much, it's more that the page headers/footers become embedded in the flow. If this gets too intrusive then I convert to ePub via plain-text with Markdown.

[David Fitz]

With headers and footers, I tend to just crop the PDF to get rid of them. This only works for me when the page number is at a different level than the footer/header because I need the numbers. Often cropping works though.

[Agama]

What tool do you use for cropping? I used to use calibre's pdfmanipulate command-line tool but it disappeared a while back.

[David Fitz]

I use acrobat pro, but there are great free tools. Check out briss (great for cropping scanned pdfs with weird page positions as well)