Re: HP50g user's guide and Sony eBook reader

Andrew Nikitin wrote:
I tried to use Sony eBook reader to view hp49g user's guide
...
So, my question is if anybody here tried to adapt manuals
to be better viewable by ebook readers? For example,
reformatting it for smaller page would help, or if there
is a version of a manual in html form, so it can be reflowed?

I have a Sony Reader PRS-505 and also have attempted to put various HP
calculator manuals on it, with mixed results. Right now I have the 48G
User's Guide, the 50g User's Manual, and the 48gII/49g+ AUR on my Reader.

Out of the box, the PRS-505 doesn't do a particularly great job with PDFs
(slow and hard to read), but there is a firmware update (version
1.1.00.18040; it came with 1.0.00.08130) that makes things a lot better. If
you have the PRS-500, however, you are out of luck.

Although PDFs are slow compared to other file formats, the PDF manuals from
HP are still usably fast. For the most optimal performance and readability,
I have had the best luck with making my own LRF files from raw images (if
the original source was a scanned document) or RTF files (if the original
source was computer-readable text), though even plain RTF files still work
fairly well, but conversion to LRF is a huge effort and isn't necessarily
worth it.

There are tools that run on the PC that you can use to take PDFs and
zoom/rotate them to make them more readable, but then they are static images
and don't look as good, plus you then lose all internal links. I have found
that the 50g User's Manual is decently readable as a PDF, but the Reader
seems to think the crop marks (which you don't normally see when viewing the
PDF on the PC) are important, so everything is scaled down at zoom size "S".
I did not have much luck in altering the PDF to crop these out. The
48gII/49g+ AUR has very tiny text, but that's because it was designed for US
Letter paper, which is a lot bigger than the Reader's screen.

Zoom to size "M", however, if you have firmware 1.1, and things become a
whole lot better with both of these PDFs. Both are extremely readable at
this size. Unfortunately, some of the diagrams get messed up when you do
this, and I haven't found a good solution.

Unfortunately, making your own LRF files, which should solve all the above
problems, is not very clearly documented, and unless I do it often I forget
the exact steps to make even a simple LRF. And incorporating inline images
or diagrams, which would be needed to convert the manuals properly, looks to
be even more difficult. There's an open-source HTML to LRF command line
tool that might be your best bet, but I do not know its limitations, and
you'd have to first get your document into HTML format. I would think that
Sony would want to make this easier, but maybe they are mainly interested in
selling you books rather than encouraging you to make your own electronic
books, even though the latter would undoubtedly increase sales of the
Reader.

The 48G User's Guide, being a set of scanned images, can't be reflowed, but
it's still surprisingly readable as it is.

Some useful tools and information can be found at the following sites:

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/

Regards,

Eric Rechlin


.

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