Tech: Christ - Kindle!

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Tootler
Date: 29 Dec 11 - 02:18 PM

Mick,

I tried Calibre and was somewhat underwhelmed by it so I removed it.

I might try the Amazon conversion service with a text only Word file and see how that does as my pdfs were generated from Open Office documents anyway.

The archive.org files I have seem to be one continuous "page" so one song runs into another with no proper break between them and the indexing is poor. With one or two of them, I have managed to find songs I was particularly looking for and added bookmarks so I can find them again.

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Melissa
Date: 29 Dec 11 - 03:08 PM

The search thingy can't find songs if you put in the title or a line?

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Tootler
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 11:51 AM

I sent a text only file in MSWord format to Amazon last night for conversion and it worked much better than the pdf conversion except that all the hyperlinks that I put in so I could jump to individual songs did not work. Otherwise the result looks fine and there were page breaks in the right places.

I since found out that in converting from Open Office to Word, the internal hyperlinks got lost. I don't know if that's a bug in Open Office or not. I will have to look for the bug tracker - presumably in Libre Office now.

I have just sent another file to Amazon. This time I converted it to html (html is on the list of accepted file types for Amazon's converter) and the hyperlinks all saved OK. I had also converted all the inline music notation images into jpegs from Enhanced Metafile (the format my notation editor exports the music files as). I think that was partly the cause of the corrupted notation in the original pdf conversions I got back from Amazon. The Enhanced Metafile relies on a font provided by the notation editor to display or the music notation glyphs and the computer needs to have it installed for the notation to display correctly. I found that out when I went over to Linux. It was easily resolved in that case, I just had to make sure the necessary fonts were installed within Linux.

I'll report back when I pick up the html file from Amazon.

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Tootler
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 03:07 PM

Well that was a disaster. The images were sent back individually and did not appear in the text. The hyperlinking worked so that that you could jump to individual songs from the contents list.

Back to the drawing board!!!!

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Stringsinger
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 03:09 PM

Fahrenheit 451 anyone? Start memorizing.

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 03:13 PM

one can skip the step of sending PDFs to Amazon by simply loading them irectly to a Kindle. (If your Kindle is connected to a computer, it appears as another stotage device>)

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 09:03 PM

Dick

The point of sending the pdf to amazon is to allow the converter to reflow the text (in a text only pdf) for better reading.

If you copy the pdf directly to the kindle (which, btw, is all I've done so far), the kindle will try to show a pdf page on the screen, often resulting in very small type; I've been rotating the screen orientation and reading in landscape, which is fine for the files I've got. (Using the zoom feature is unwieldy - you have to scroll horizontally to read a line).

The converter (and you don't need to go via amazon - there are free converters that will do the same job, convert to mobi, which is what amazon's azw format essentially is. Calibre mentioned above will do this) will allow the text to flow better in larger type on the screen. There do seem to be problems with pdf conversion however - header, footers and page numbers may end up in the text. If you can do without them, there are some recommendations to crop the pdf to the text are before conversion.

For image-based pdfs the problems are different. At least one site I looked at recommended using a utility which splits out the pages and alters the contrast for better reading on the kindle, then reassembling the pdf and converting to mobi. I haven't looked at this in detail (maybe tomorrow - or later today as it is now) so I can't say whether it's worth the trouble or not.

Happy New Year to come from where we already are.

Mick

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: GUEST,mg
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 10:36 PM

I have the cheapest version where they send you advertisements when you shut it down..sort of like screensavers...

I have read dozens of books for free..for the foreseeable future anything I get will be free...I have read some Celtic magazines, some books about African American and Scots music, some Irish history, slave narratives..and of course some romance novels. mg

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 31 Dec 11 - 10:46 PM

I still read books on paper. Silly me. ;-)

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: MartinRyan
Date: 01 Jan 12 - 05:11 AM

Mick

Very good summary of the overall situation - reflects my own experience over the last (first!) few days.I'm beginning to think that in some cases at least I'll need to hold both a PDF and a Kindle-ised version of a book. The balance of advantage varies depending on whether I want to read through, search or make quick reference to content.


Regards

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Tootler
Date: 01 Jan 12 - 05:31 AM

The point of sending the pdf to amazon is to allow the converter to reflow the text (in a text only pdf) for better reading.

If you copy the pdf directly to the kindle (which, btw, is all I've done so far), the kindle will try to show a pdf page on the screen, often resulting in very small type

If you are creating your own pdf, the alternative to conversion is simply to use a large font size. I find a minimum of 16pt is needed for a readable pdf and 20pt, or even larger is better. For my song books, I mostly use 16pt to try and keep most on one page or, at the most, two, but for continuous text, I normally use 20pt. Inline images will show up fine, but any colour images will end up monochrome.

I will have to investigate converters again and maybe give Calibre another try.

Subject: RE: Tech: Christ - Kindle!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 02 Jan 12 - 02:31 PM

I just realized/found out that (we must have the same Santa) I can upload pretty much all my music to the "cloud" which will then make it accessible on my new Kindle fire, since most of it was bought there anyway... yay!

But how is your problem working out?