It's doable. The original work on reflow was done by Thomas Breuel back in 2003: http://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~wda2003/Papers/Section_II/Paper_5....

One of the problems with doing this in pdf is that for most documents, you need to infer reading order. A decade ago I wrote the code in poppler to do that (yet again, based off papers by Breuel) in order to get multi column select working. At the time I wanted pdfs to be readable on my iRex Iliad... anyhoo, most of the pieces are there in poppler. It can figure out reading order, render piece by piece, and already differentiates between images and text under the hood. Still a lot of work.

k2pdfopt works ok for me.

(bash function)

    tokindle () {
      ~/Software/k2pdfopt $* -dev kpw -mode fw -wrap -hy -ws 0.375 -ls-
    }

There's also koreader, which just uses k2pdfopt on the fly.

koreader looks fabulous! Last time I checked, the Paperwhite could not be jailbroken. But it no longer seems true. Thanks for the link.

Yes! All versions can now be easily jailbroken. The main features (to me) are installing KOReader to view epubs and pdf files, and hacking the screen saver display. The process only takes about an hour, mostly because you are reading, doublechecking, and downloading the right files. This guide[0] is a very good overview. I find mobileread's site to be too wordy and difficult to follow.

[0] http://lifehacker.com/how-to-jailbreak-your-kindle-178386407...

Which version would you buy if you were buying a Kindle today? I only owned the one before the DX... managed to crack the screen in an unfortunate elbow-related incident.

Paperwhite has been really good to me. Both Oasis and Voyage look great as well - they have higher resolution than the Paperwhite. And they have real buttons to move between pages, so if I were buying a Kindle today I'd buy one of them depending on my budget (Oasis is more expensive, but slimmer).

Current (and previous) generation Paperwhites have the same resolution as the Voyage and Oasis. I have a Paperwhite and the screen is fantastic. I'd love hardware buttons for page turning, though.

While the Oasis is expensive, if you add a nice cover to the Voyage you're close in pricing. Either go solidly midline with the Paperwhite or go all out with the Oasis, depending on your budget.

My Paperwhite was collecting dust until my recent discovery of KOReader.

I'm now toying with my own instance of https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server since KOReader also runs on my Android devices.

I'm not 100% sure how(/if) I plan to sync PDFs, versus just downloading from source on each device.

I intend to play with OPDS as well.

Thanks! just tried this out, and it seems to work pretty well.

I'm having some trouble using the margin option -m to strip the vertical sidebar text from an arXiv paper, would you happen to have a solution to that problem that doesn't involve a lot of manual intervention? Using '-m 0.5in' handles the vertical text, but then the body text isn't coming out quite right...

Sorry, not at the moment. I figured out those parameters after tweaking things a bit. You might want to start the conversion with just the name of the file, and use the interactive prompt to try out various parameters.

Here's a tool built on k2pdfopt to streamline pushing papers to an ebook reader: http://dontprint.net/

Any reason they don't distribute the addon through Mozilla? Sorry but it sounds a bit suspicious...

Agreed. Nothing against the described service or its users, but personally when I'm searching for something like this, "upload" comes right before Ctrl-W for me.

k2pdfopt: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ We use that engine in the OSS KoReader application.

The last time I tried to build k2pdfopt, the source zip was missing a bunch of files. You had to download another zip, which wasn't complete either, and combine the results. And then the build failed because cmake was having a bad hair day. I wanted to like it since the windows exe did seem very handy, but had to give up at that point. (Oh, wait, there was a bit more. I did get it building, but the source assumed fprintf(NULL, "log msg") was a perfectly fine thing to do. That's when I gave up.)

I'm trying right now to build it from source, and I'm astonished that it doesn't come with automake tools.

I'm pretty much used to all the sources to work with "./configure && make", and have a BUILDING.txt or INSTALL.txt. k2pdfopt doesn't have any of this.

How does it compare to PDFLower?

android closed-source payed app that does reflow: ezPDF Reader