eBook

In this article I show you a concrete example on the use of my previous tutorials about PDF optimizations, in particular I have added a new pagination, toc and bookmarks. The used PDF is a very old technical dictionary (in English, Italian, French and German), but it is not in copyright and for some words is yet useful.

Generally to facilitate my translations I use the following sites:

I admit it: my ebook reader has many problem in loading some type of PDFs, though I had made various tricks to fix this problem, like my site can testify! In last days I have tried a new approach, the conversion to CBZ, a type of archive file for the purpose of sequential viewing of images especially comic books. And for now, it works!

Sometime people shares PDF documents too big in size, so they are hard to keep and to display, specially in old PCs and eBook readers. Generally these PDFs are formed by images with high resolutions that need reductions. It follows my solution to cut down their size using ImageMagick in two steps.

In the previous article I explain how to insert toc and/or bookmarks using LaTeX in a PDF document, omitting a very boring aspect: selection and writing of all parts that you want insert in these ones (avoiding errors when the items are very numerous!). In order to automate this procedure, I wrote a small bash script that converts the output made by JPDFBookmarks in a text file pasteable in LaTeX.

The idea is like to adding bookmark using LaTeX, but in this case I insert a new table of contents, the resulting page numbering and a direct anchor to TOC in every page. How? Using LaTeX of course!

Very often you want to read comfortably on screen or on eBook reader, the PDFs created for printing: two side or slides of presentations (2 or more slides per page), without zooming or scrolling from side to side. After several fruitless searching I have found a great solution: LaTeX. With the help of 2 different types of PDFs, I show you how to automatically crop them.

The convenience of a good index in printed documents is essential to ensure fast tracking of the desired content, and a rapid overview. In PDF files, however, the situation is different, they are always too slow and uncomfortable, not to mention of their consultation in the ebook reader. So the bookmarks become an unavoidable choice, below I describe how to insert them with LaTeX or with a friendly GUI editor.

A big gap of my eBook reader, the Asus DR900, is the maximum page zoom fixed to 200%. Generally the 200% works fine for most PDF file, but when I try to read PDF that includes double pages or document in A4 with A3 pages, the reading become very difficult. So I wrote a little bash script called set-uniform-pagination.sh that halves the pages exceeding the horizontal dimension of the first.

It is a electronic gadget little widespread, but with some hint it might be an optimal solution to read comfortably digital documents, without using printer or staying for long time in front at the monitor.

I own an ebook reader for almost a year, in detail an Asus DR900. It is a problematic product with some imperfections that lets me consult documents, saving me from photocopies and from eye strain.