K3 for Non-MOBI Formats

[Jeremy D Brooks]

I've had my K3 for a while now (ordered in the first batch when they were announced), and did a review on my website. Not sure why it took me so long to find this site...

One of the things I was excited about was the ability to read PDFs...I have a ton of small-market mags and anthologies on PDF and was looking forward to digging through them. I hate reading on a computer screen.

The results were, as most of you probably know by now, disheartening. The screen is just way too small for reading PDFs. You can scroll, but with the eink delay, it just doesn't work well. Or, you can squint.

Here are a few pix.

Regular MOBI file


Single-page PDF (courtesy of GUD Magazine, fyi)


Double-page PDF (courtesy of Arkham Tales)


I did a more complete write-up on my website, stop by if you're interested or want to see larger versions of those images:

http://jeremydbrooks.com/?p=198

[pidgeon92]

Your third example would look much better if you used landscape vs. portrait.

[Jeremy D Brooks]

Your third example would look much better if you used landscape vs. portrait.

Good point...I set that one for landscape, and it was even worse: it filled the page vertically but cut off the bottom third of the page. Again, scrollable, but with the e-ink delay.



To be fair, I love my K3...I'm just a bit bummed about the PDF support. I didn't research that deep enough before buying.

[pidgeon92]

That stinks. As does the PDF support.

[kisrita]

I agree, pdf support is not quite good enough yet. That's why I convert all my pdf files to mobi files. Calibre and Mobipocket creator both work well to convert them, but I like Calibre better since you don't have to connect the Kindle to the computer to get your files, you can just email them to the Kindle and it shows up like the rest of the Amazon books. (Use the @free.kindle email address to avoid the fee, and change the pdf input options; set the line wrapping to 0.40 for the Kindle 3, otherwise the converted file is displayed with line breaks in the middle of the second or third line.)

[Rob Drob]

I have found it easier to just email the pdf to my free kindle email address and just use the word convert in the subject field of the email. Works great for me..

[Jeremy D Brooks]

How well does that work for PDFs with a lot of images and formatting (i.e., magazines)?

[ChuckT]

pdf conversion for a K3? Tried it, din't like it!

I was hoping I could use my K3 to carry instruction manuals instead of toting around squinty little english-as-a-second-language paper books.  Isn't going to happen - the pdf conversion is not ready for prime time.

All of the pdfs I tried sending to *@free.kindle or *@kindle came through too big (who wants to scroll around that much!) and one would only display a grey first page followed by 53 pages of nothing but a single horizontal bar.

Pity - I think I remember Adobe bragging that pdf files would self-adapt to any reasonable hardware display size.

I tried one conversion program - Clibra or some-such, it won't load (win7 professional, 64bit).  Trying another, "PDFRead" tonite.
cvt

[ChuckT]

PDF Conversion

PDFread worked for a 112 page camera manual, the rotation is a bit off-putting though. Next I will try a 74 page Linksys Router manual that is havey on illustrations.

cvt

[shalym]

When you sent the PDFs to your Kindle using your Kindle email addresses, did you put "convert" in the subject line?  If you don't do this, you're not actually converting the file, you're just sending it to your Kindle as a straight PDF file.

Shari

[HeatherCashman]

I have read a lot of PDFs that I just go in and change the font size before dropping them into my kindle via drag-and-drop. I have found it works beautifully and eliminates the scrolling issue.