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Posted by: Bigity Aug 6 2011, 10:26 PM

Has anyone used the Kindle Personal Documents conversion service with any of the Shadowrun PDFs? For a small fee they will supposedly covert them to a format that a Kindle will work better with, I'm hoping that means load/page times, and converting to a one column format.

Anyone have/heard of any experience with this?

Posted by: MikeKozar Aug 6 2011, 11:08 PM

I loaded the PDFs directly onto my Kindle, and they show up as a single page - the resolution is good enough I can read it if I lean in and squint, but you might have better luck with the magazine-sized model then the novel-sized model. I haven't tried their conversion service, so I'm not sure if it supports splitting the pages up by column or some sort of pan and zoom option - right now I use my laptop rather then my Kindle.

Pity, really, it's a brilliant device.

Posted by: suoq Aug 7 2011, 12:18 AM

My understanding is that the size of the PDFs exceeds the size that they'll accept in their conversion process.

Beyond that, I'm a bit worried that the formatting is wonky, as by any number of cut and paste issues (especially spaces in the middle of words), and search issues (which seem to find things in random order on some pages).

If you do get a successful conversion to kindle, please let me know how. I've given up.

Posted by: KCKitsune Aug 7 2011, 07:58 PM

I use my Nook Color for my PDF needs. If I put it in landscape mode, the file reads fine.

Posted by: Socinus Aug 7 2011, 10:21 PM

I was looking to pick up a Nook Color for the purpose of reading PDFs.

How does it do with PDFs in general? I have LOTS of ebooks, but they're ALL PDF format and I had basically given up and was waiting for someone to come out with a dedicated portable PDF reader.

The iPad is too expensive and does WAY more than I want to (and it's Apple), the Kindle apparently doesnt handle PDFs very well.

Posted by: Mardrax Aug 9 2011, 09:31 PM

For normal text-only ebooks, my smartphone always handled reading them just fine in landscape mode.
For SR books, it tended to get utterly swamped, and even be unable to read some, while others worked fine, albeit slow.

Posted by: Socinus Aug 10 2011, 09:16 AM

A smartphone has the same problem as the iPad; I'm paying lots of money for features I neither want, need, or will ever use. Additionally, I'd prefer something a little larger than a smartphone.

Posted by: suoq Aug 10 2011, 12:17 PM

I use Calibre last night for the conversion and what I suspected would happen did happen. The PDF does not appear, in any way, to be in sequential order, completely mucking up the conversion process. One suggestion I saw was to run the PDF through an optical reader. If anyone tries it and has luck, please let me know.

Posted by: Blade Aug 10 2011, 12:50 PM

I made a converter to convert Shadowrun's PDF to html files, without the pictures but keeping the layout intact and adding some ways to help the navigation. It's been a long time since I last used it (IIRC when Unwired came out), but I'll try to see if I can use it to get something interesting on my Nook Touch.

Posted by: KCKitsune Aug 10 2011, 01:40 PM

The PDF's look fine.

If you want to have a tablet without spending a fortune, you can convert the Nook Color into a full android tablet, and the people in the http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=960542 can give you instructions on how to do it. I've done it and it works great.