Curious Drake » Vince

Shadowy World

Vince — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:32:51 +0000

on the water

Vince — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:49:15 +0000

waves

borg walk

excess

Poplar Fluff

Vince — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 05:12:58 +0000

Love my new Leica

Vince — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:54:42 +0000

trip to marina

Vince — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 20:32:04 +0000

Smoke on the Water Fire in the Sky

Vince — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:51:40 +0000

Photoblogging

Color Fall

Smoke on the water fire in the sky

Beginning of the Fall

Color Fall

Vince — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:43:10 +0000

Being there, have not done that enough

Toronto on the Don

Vince — Tue, 31 May 2011 00:54:22 +0000

And the flowers got a 5
And the flowers got a 5

At the Crossroads

Inorganic growth

Tracking Technology

Walking along biking path on Don River Valley in Toronto

Vince — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 03:34:35 +0000

I started to play with oldies and goodies - an old style, not even AI, Nikkor 50 f2.0 lens on Nikon D70 camera. I enjoy this setup so much more than modern fully automatic cameras with auto focus lenses. May be it shows my age, or may be, I am earning to return to the fundamentals of photography. I do not know yet.

Threshold of Wildness

No Such Thing

Escaping Homeland

PDF to MOBI Conversion for Kindle

Vince — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 22:40:23 +0000

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

Original 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”

kinglegen input

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

kindlegen output

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.

The same document in 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.

In this case the image came out rather small