Curious Drake

If you have a Kindle and you want to read technical papers in PDF format, you might know that it is not very easy to do. The Kindle DX has a large screen allowing landscape viewing where PDF looks reasonable good, but you cannot make highlights to the document and if you have poor sight, as I do, you cannot really read small fonts. Zooming helps a little but turning pages is really tedious in the zoom mode.

After many attempts, I have found a relatively easy way of converting technical papers in from PDF to mobi for reading on Kindle. This is the only way for somewhat reliable conversion of multi-column PDF layout into a “reflow” .mobi document. You would need to use Adobe Acrobat and kindlegen program from Amazon.com

Step-by-step instructions

1. Open a the pdf file in Adobe Acrobat

2. export document using File->Export->HTML 4.01 with CSS 1.o. If this technical mambo-jambo scares you– do not panic– you do not need to know what it means. All you need to do is to save the produced file in a place that you can find afterwards. Make sure you also copy kindlegen.exe to the same location

3. Open windows command line shell. If you are on Windows 7, just type “cmd” in the  ”Search for programs and files” dialog box. Navigate to the location where you stored the output file from Acrobat

4. type kindlegen.exe -gif name_of_your_html_file.html and press “Enter”

5. Check the output and verify that the only warning  produced by kindlegen is about the absence of cover page and there is no any error messages

If there were no errors, the resulting .mobi file should be in the same directory.

6. Transfer the mobi file to the Kindle in a way you usually do that. When you are done, open the document in the Kindle.

As you can see, the document is now in one column. You can now make notes, set bookmarks and change font sizes, and read it out loud using the Kindle’s text-to-speech.

But there is at least one  drawback that I have noticed in using this technique. During the conversion the images keep their original size and they come out rather small on the high resolution Kindle screen as you can see on the next picture. There must be a way to fix it, but I did not figure that out yet.