PDF and the Sony Reader PRS500
June 22, 2007
Someone asked me to make a few pictures to review the Sony Reader’s capability to parse PDF-files. He sent me a PDF-version of WOW-rules to review.
When I opened this file I already knew it’s trouble. Not only are the ltters very small, they’re also in a fancy font, and printed on a coloured background. Even the page is not standard A4, but a somewhat square pages. So I ran the file through the free tool RasterFarian which rasterized and optimizes PDF-files for the sony reader, so we can have a comparison.
For the records: the original PDF was 3MB, the converted PDF is 2 MB.
And when testing, my expectations were confirmed. The PDF, without any optimizing is impossible to read. Not only that, turning the page is much slower (5+ seconds )than normal LRF-files (1,5 seconds)
Here are the results. Click for a larger image:
Unprocessed:
Processed:
Unprocessed:
Processed:
Conclusion
As you can see, the processed document is much more readable. So if you’re a PDF-reader you’d want to convert your PDF-files. The reader is not meant for occasional PDF-reading
It takes my workstation (AMD 3800+ (Dual Core), 2GB RAM) about 20 seconds to process 4 pages.
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[...] written in our previous post, PDF aren’t displayed very well off-the-shelf on the Sony Reader PRS500. I think the same problems would occur to the direct [...]
Pingback by Hightech @ AFmag.net » Converting PDF to the LRF using a rasterfarian/msh_lrsparser combo — June 24, 2007 @ 10:42 am
Tears of joy….
after struggling with pdf files (meant for A4) and chm files (meant for… well the big brother OS) for 1 day after having bought Sony Reader PRS500, i think i have finally got the solution. PDF files u can still manage to read “somehow”, getting chm (lets say a techy chm book with lots of links) into a readable format (yes, i tried everything, somewhere or the other it breaks, either the format, or the layout etc etc. With RasterFarian, not the PDF files are a breeze. I can convert all the CHM to pdf (A4 size atleast if nothing else works) and run RasterFarian and voila!!! i have something readable.
Comment by alok — July 21, 2007 @ 11:49 pm
sorry …typo…”not the PDF files are a breeze” shold read “the PDF files are a breeze”
Comment by alok — July 21, 2007 @ 11:50 pm