[Wylug-discuss] advice on ebook reader or similar...

[Jim Jackson]

On Sat, 24 Sep 2011, Dave Fisher wrote:

> On 24 September 2011 20:51, Jim Jackson <jj at franjam.org.uk> wrote:
> > generated a lot of discussion. I've googled around a bit more, and to be
> > honest, everyone seems to knock ereader's abilities with PDFs.
> 
> The problem isn't the e-readers, it's the PDF format, and it's lack of
> really quite basic metadata.
> 
> PDF is, in one respect a kind of anti-XML ... all the markup is
> dedicated to ensuring that the print/screen version looks right,
> virtually nothing to ensuring that content is semantically meaningful
> or translatable.

It's a shame that the main driving force for me even contemplating an 
ereader is to read PDFs ! I'm actually ok with reading paper books.
Ah well.

> > re. kindle...
> > On Thu, 22 Sep 2011, Dave Fisher wrote:
> >> 2. It doesn't re-flow PDF text ... not a problem if you have the A4
> >> Kindle, and mostly surmountable by (imperfect) conversion on the
> >> smaller device.
> >
> > conversion to what format? Have you converted many PDFs? What's the
> > gotchas? From my browsing, it appears to be graphics in PDFs that cause the
> > main problems.
> 
> I have converted lots of PDFs to epub using Calibre.
> 
> An epub is, basically, a zipped-up collection of HTML files. With
> separate HTML files for front-matter, ToCs, volumes, indexes, etc.
> 
> Generally speaking, text flow, hypertext, and embedded objects like
> images and tables are handled fairly well.
> 
> Obviously you lose page-layout.
> 
> Irritatingly, you don't lose the page headers and footers, but you can
> set up regexp filters to take them out.
> 
> I haven't had time (or rather haven't bothered) to automate that yet
> ... vim does the job.
> 
> Dave
> 
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