Re:Stop reading this blog and learn something
by gruseom on Monday January 02, 2012 @09:06PM
(#3418314)
Thanks. Makes me wonder if there's a startup in there somewhere, for converting pdf to mobi or even a device optimized for reading pdfs.
I respect pdfs for their Postscript origins but man do I hate getting a pdf link, hate waiting for them to load, hate reading them on my computer. And yet much of what I want to read is locked inside them.
Re:Stop reading this blog and learn something
by SkyMarshal on Wednesday January 04, 2012 @04:41PM
(#3426040)
That thought occurred to me too. There are a bunch already working on it and are all listed in the sidebar of the kindle subreddit. But I imagine whoever perfects it is looking at a quick buyout from one of them, or maybe even Amazon. It's definitely a real pain point for an otherwise brilliant product.
The biggest problem is that Kindle can't reflow PDF text the way it does with mobi formats (which I believe is true anywhere you read PDF, not just kindle), so you can't seamlessly resize the text. You can zoom the PDF document to enlarge the text, but page turning functionality doesn't work until you zoom back out since a zoomed document will reinterpret page turn actions as horizontal scrolling actions (on Kindle Touch at least, not sure about the others with specific hardware buttons for page turning).
There is a literal ton of info on converting PDF to mobi at the Kindle subreddit, but no perfect conversion techniques yet:
http://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/search?q=pdf&restrict_sr=...
Some suggestions:
1. Use Briss (http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/) to trim the margins of the pdf, then read it in Landscape mode. This naturally enlarges the text without breaking page turning.
2. Use any of the converters listed in the Reddit/r/kindle sidebar, whether downloadable software or web-based (Readability, Instapaper, SendToReader, etc).
3. Use Calibre to convert PDF to mobi (results are mixed, and graphs and images aren't handled so well).
4. Email your PDF to [email protected] with "convert" in the subject to have the PDF converted to mobi by Amazon and then delivered to your kindle. Similar results as 4.
All of them except #1 result in mangled formatting to some degree or other, especially PDFs (or PDFs created from websites) with special math or code formatting. Like I said, servicable, you can read it and get the info, but not the brilliant reading experience it is with native .mobi files.