[bigity]

Has anyone used the Kindle Personal Documents conversion service with any of the Shadowrun PDFs?  For a small fee they will supposedly covert them to a format that a Kindle will work better with, I'm hoping that means load/page times, and converting to a one column format.

Anyone have/heard of any experience with this?

[kirk]

Nook, not Kindle, for the following ymmv.

I convert using calibre. It works, and works quite well for most things. It is also free. Kindle's format is one of the conversions it will make.  (I don't know rules about linking to various products so I'll let you browse/datasearch (a low threshold test) instead.)

PDFs are the hardest formats to convert, regardless of program that's doing the conversion.  You'll have to tweak to make it work (which it sometimes will not). The good news is that the providers suggest tweaks, and those usually work.

Obviously I've not used Kindle's Personal Documents, but I see no reason to expect them to be worse than Calibre. That means it should make at least decent conversions.

[bigity]

I tried Calibre and it just didn't work.  I went through the first 10 pages and had all kind of weirdness.  Some pages had 2-3 words on them, some had one part of an image (such as the image behind the page number or something), then some pages would have every other word of a paragraph and the next page had the others. 

Of course, I may just need to tweak it up some.

[kirk]

Right. That's the standard problem. The usual (but not always) fix is to reduce the line un-wrapping factor. 0.35 works for me, for Nook. Some people go to .25, or even lower. 

That's preferences => conversion => PDF Input to get the page, then change the setting.

Oh. line un-wrapping factor is: "If the next line is [factor] or more of full line, add it to the previous line."  The assumption is a short line is actually part of what's above it. I do not know why this usually fixes PDFs, nor why it sometimes doesn't.  It does, usually.

[kirk]

Sorry, this is wrong.

"If the next line is [factor] or more of full line, add it to the previous line."

mea culpa

If the next line is [factor] or more of a full line, un-wrap it, not add it to the previous line.

[JoeNapalm]

Haven't had much luck in the Kindle - they're awesome on the iPad, however.

(The one time I prefer a book on the iPad).

-Jn-
Ifriti Sophist

[Trenchknife]

I'm not an Ipad kinda guy.  I'm seriously looking at Asus' new Eee pad though.  Anyone have one of these and seen if the PDFs work or not on it?