Experimentation paid off - documents added to eBook reader.

[pecosdave]

My Kindle can read PDF's and most electronics come with their documentation on PDF these days, I thought that was pretty cool, but really, PDF's are to rigid, they suck on a screen as small as a normal Kindles. It's handy to put the manuals on there anyways, but there's too much hunting and scrolling

Comments

converting PDF to something else

[anonymous]

I know Adobe makes software that converts PDF back to word format.. but I know you enough to know you want to spend zero coin..been thinking about getting a tablet pc.. Droid of course.. just for the usefulness of it.

too many wants, not enough paycheck.... sigh

Jeff Coleman

Re: converting PDF to something else

[pecosdave]

I'm not against spending money on software in all cases. I'm seriously considering shelling out a few bucks for a BluRay ripping software and I did pay for a UMD ripper. If you count video games as software (which they are) I buy lots of it.

I do believe in FOSS when possible. There's certain things you pay for - entertainment is one of them, that's not to say there isn't a lot of really good free entertainment out there. Getting things done works best when everyone can do it, not just a few people. If I make something work I want to be able to tell everyone else how to make it work and if I tell someone else I don't expect to have to buy something, it looks like I'm getting a kickback and it creates suspicion in many cases. Also a lot of paid for stuff winds up being "stolen" GPL stuff anyways, there's many people selling repackaged copies of Gimp, Libre Office, VLC and Handbrake on eBay. Some of them comply with the GPL but make a few bucks, many don't.

Here's an example of a very good how to I did quite some time ago, be

[iptv_tech]

I hate it when they make PDFs that way.

I tend to look for PDFs where the text is an actual text layer, resizable and displayable in whatever font and size you choose (hence the "portable" part of the document format).

Unfortunately, when it comes to manuals, your options for looking are limited to what the manufacturer has put out, which is typically a scanned image rather than typed text. All PDF can do with that is resize the image (which, mind you, _looks_ like text...) which eliminates all the capability of word wrapping and such that would make it useful on a Kindle or any other such device.

A few, very very few, manufacturers have started publishing their manuals as HTML pages. That will probably work better once it takes off. If it takes off.