While we’re waiting for the new Bookeen reader to emerge, Sony seems to have been busy. Lately, the current Sony Reader PRS500 has been on sale. Could it be that it’s making way for the new model?

One online store has leaked out the first view on the new Sony Reader, codenamed PRS505 SC for a suggested price of 299 dollar.

The improvements?

• Better ergonomics
• USB2.0 (PRS500 USB-transfer is SLOOOOW)
• Slim : “Old” Reader: 175.6mm x 123.6mm x 13.8mm New Reader: 175mm x 122mm x 8mm
• More memory (160 books instead of 80. The old reader has about 90MB of RAM, this one about 200?) which should speeding up rendering.

ETA October 2007 (Bookeen ETA’s September 2007)

Here’s how it looks like.

it seems that the new sony reader is going to be in two colors. Silver and blue. PRS505sc for the silver, prs505lc for our familiar metallic blue/black

This reader would probably be using the new vizplex screen, but exact details were not given. According to the description on the product page, it seems that the on-board memory has doubled, as it’s specced to be able to hold 160 books instead of 80.

I’m not sure I like the move on the numeric buttons. It makes the reader seems bulky…

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The history: RasterFarian got removed from mobileread because it was using a licensed tool, pdcat.exe from pdf-tools.com. There was a whole ruckus about it.

Ironicly, that tool was doing nothing more than “copying” (cat) the original PDF to another location, so it was not even needed…

Alex_D once gave me the green light to release a patched/debugged version of RasterFarian, so I’ve taken my freedom to just patching it to NOT use the licensed tool anymore.

I’ve removed the pdcat.exe from the package, and instead I’m merely using windows builtin “copy”-command to do the things.

Download rasterfarian (patched)

PS. as far as I know, only the pdcat-too was licensed, the rest are opensource or free tools.

PS2. This patched version is released “as is”. I haven’t tested it extensively, but on a few PDF-files i’ve made, it seems to work without probs. If you found bugs, report here and I’ll see what I can do, but can’t promise anything. I’m not the original author, and I don’t like shellprogramming, so I rather dislike giving support.

PS3. A “thank you”-comment is appreciated.

At the moment of writing there are a few rasterizing-tools available to create LRF files from PDF. I’ve made a comparison of these three products.

The chose settings:

Rasterfarian: settings as described here

PDFread: no cropping, dilation 300, edge level: 5, optimize PNGs

pdflrf: simply nosplitpage, nosmartcut, no cropping, rotation=0.

Converting a file with pdfread creates the smallest lrf, namely 266KB. However, the image quality is very bad. The lines aren’t smooth, and the text in the bubbles are hard to read.

pdflrf is better. The images are clear and readable, but lacks contrast. The size of the resulting LRF is 604KB though. Chosing 4 colors produces smaller size (285KB) but it produces less sharp and more washed out images compared to rasterfarian.

The same PDF-file converted with Rasterfarian result in a 300KB-lrf and the image quality as loaded in the reader has the highest contrast as well as clearity. Text are smooth and many details remains.

So… it’s obvious for me, Rasterfarian is a true winner for the creation of imagebased-lrffiles. Not only does it create the best quality images, it’s filesize is great too.

However, PDFread and PDFLRF both have a nice windows userinterface. Rasterfarian might be somewhat more complicated to use.

The pdf-files and the resulting LRF-files are attached to this article

Original PDF-file for rasterization

PDFlrf converted manga

PDFlrf converted manga 4 colors

PDFread converted manga

Manga converted with rasterfaran

Here’s the promised, but majorly delayed tutorial on how to use Manga2Ebook and rasterfarian to create PDF-files.

The first step is to Manga2Ebook to convert a collection of manga-books into PDF-form. The program itself has a usage-explanation, and the default values are optimzed for creating manga-pdfs for the Sony Reader already, so I’m not going to explain that.

Just select the directory where you have your manga, type in a title and chose start to create portrait manga.

(if you want to create comics like this:

Chose “resize based on width” and disable rotate. It’ll fit all the comic strips into a page)

When the PDF is done, start rasterfarian by rightclicking on the PDF-file in windows and chose “rasterfarian”, then follow these steps:

1. Chose advanced interface
2. Chose priority belownormal (so you can do other things)
3. Autocrop the file: no
4. Arrange as: 1)whole pages per screen
5. Level of post-processing: full
6. Level of boldness: 6
7. Level of edge enhancement: 7
8. Preview page: Skip (takes too long and result on a monitor is poor anyways)
9. Number of threads: your CPU-core times 2. I have a QuadCore CPU, so I chose 4×2=8
10. Enter a title/author: whatever you want

Now it will create the lrf-file you want.

Introduction:
10-15 years ago when we’re talking about diesel cars, you might think of slow, noisy and dirty cars. But in the last small 10 years, the engine builders have improved the diesel engines using new techniques.

Nowadays diesel cars are much quieter, cleaner, more efficient and got a good performance which can compete with their same engine size gasoline brothers.

Why choose a dieselcar? Of course, the fuel is cheaper and because the the diesel engine has less moving parts, it means that there is a reduction in the wearout of some parts. A diesel engine is much stronger and built for more mileage. That results to lower maintenance bills. Also, running on diesel puts less global-warming pollution into the air.

Another plus is that you can easily chiptune a diesel car for less money instead of buying a fast gasoline alternate.

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