I have about a DVD full of preparedness books and manuals that I'd love to convert from PDF to some ebook format (epub, mobi, etc) for use on my Kindle. The Kindle handles native PDF format but you can't scale the fonts and end up doing a lot of scrolling. Nearly every conversion I've tried has grossly increased the file size. Most PDFs seem to be scanned images rather than text which causes this problem. I'd like to OCR the files but so far the stuff I've found either does a poor job which leads to a lot of manual corrections or only does a page at a time instead of processing the complete document. I was wondering if anyone else has tried this and if so have you found a viable solution?
Adobe reader can OCR image PDFs. I think it's under document. Works well. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Try using the "Save as Text" command under file and then use an eBook converter...that was the best way I found when I put Unintended Consequences on the Kindle...
Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR I'm not by a computer and don't remember if this on Adobe Reader or Standard. Openoffice.org writer has some good PDF tools. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Try copy/paste into Word, might be an easier way to put them in useful format. BTW, pdf is a real space saver, that's one of its advantages. But it saves coding by not allowing changes. (I think.)
It looks like it was part of 8.1 and not 8. And now that I've updated to X I can't find it. Guess I'll roll back. ETA: Found it under File -> Save As -> Text. Seems to work but the files would need some cleanup to make things flow properly. Looks like this'll be a work in progress. I'll have to see if it's feasible to do a copy/paste. There is a PDF to Word converter I haven't tried. I could possibly use that to convert to RTF and then convert that to the e-reader formats. PDF is nice and if it were scalable that'd be fine. In my experience, though, the font size is very small and the scrolling gets old fast.
For anyone looking to convert other Ereader formats, such as Epub, for use on the Kindle, try Calibre software. It's a free download. Just google Calibre. I've only tried it a couple of times but it seems to work pretty well.
Awesome, I downloaded that at work and did a couple of files. Looks like I'd still need to spend a lot of time tweaking the resulting files but I'm going to play with it some more. Calibre is what I use to maintain the library but it's not good for converting PDFs. It's excellent for converting between text, epub, mobi, etc. Unfortunately, though, as I mentioned previously, most PDFs are scanned images and just get 1000x larger when converted.
The way i do it, is just take a file, then print it using "dopdf". This is how i create pdf's. Not really tech savy, but simple works for me. Download PDF converter doPDF and create PDF for free
Well, that'd be all find and dandy if I were trying to create PDFs but I'm not. I'm trying to convert PDFs that I have to other, more e-reader friendly formats.
Download Calibre. It will do what you want it to do. I use it all the time when I find books I want that aren't in Kindle format. Calibre will convert things to Mobi for Kindle, or Epub for Nook, just for examples. The only limit is if the book in question has DRM, than Calibre won't do the conversion.
Yes, Calibre will convert PDF to other formats. However, the problem lays in how the PDF was created. Most of the older books are scanned images. So here are a few examples to demonstrate what I'm trying to overcome. Where There Is No Doctor PDF = 54MB MOBI = 510MB WHO Basic Lab PDF = 14MB MOBI = 347MB NATO Emergency War Surgery PDF = 25MB MOBI = 144MB Now this isn't always the case, but as you can see in most every conversion the resulting file is exponentially larger than the source. There are some that go the right direction but these are few and far between. Management of Dead Bodies in a Disaster PDF = 782KB MOBI = 546KB Wound Closure Manual PDF = 1231KB MOBI = 1098KB
I don't have the answer to that, but I have seen smaller copies of both "Where there is no..." books. In the 6 to 8 meg range, for what that's worth. It doesn't solve your immediate problem, though. I wonder if just leaving them as PDFs would work for you? The Kindle 3 can handle PDFs much better than the earlier versions. The scanned origin may be a problem there, too.
I certainly wasn't expecting the gross increase in size. My issue with the Kindle's native PDF support is that you can't control the font size like you can with other formats and I find that I end up having to zoom in/out and/or scroll to read which makes it cumbersome. Maybe I need to play with it some more, though.
