I was wondering. I have numerous .doc files and .pdf files on my computer and I just recently got a Nook Color. It takes ages for the doc files to load in the reader and my issue with the pdf files is that it is unwieldy to read as is. Certainly neither are as easy to handle as my ebooks, which are all epub files. My question is...are there any good free pdf/doc to epub converters that anyone here could recommend? Thanks in advance. :)
Shannon
Nook Stuff
I got a ColorNook for my birthday last June, and I LOVE it!
Now, I'm not sure what I use will work for you because the first thing I did was Root it ( using manual nooter).
I have found that for converisons, the best bet is Calbre ( free ), I use Dolphin broswer, Akidio ereader which reads doc files.
Any help you need, drop me a note.
Sapphire
( written on my ColorNook )
Calibre
Well, misspelling Calibre won't help track it down. Here's a link. http://calibre-ebook.com/ The various threads on ePub I've come across all recommend Calibre for this purpose.
Yours,
JohnBobMead
Yours,
John Robert Mead
spelling....
Yea, I misspelled it... but, in my defense, I was not only lying in bed at the time, I also didn't have any links with me...
But you ( and she ) got the idea....
Sapphire ( who thanks the Gods almost daily for spell-check! )
Muphry's Law
If you're going to be picky about someone else's accuracy, be accurate yourself. If you type "calbre" into Google, the first link it offers is the same one you did, so the misspelling works to find the link as well as spelling it right does. This is called Muphry's Law, which says, "Any public correction of a minor error will contain an error."
And while were on the subject, does anyone know what Cole's Law is?
Finely chopped cabbage. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
and that's why
I truly detest proprietary programs. You have to buy their stuff or nothing wants to work right. I am still using my trusty old PDA to read with. The screen is small, but it is backlit. Go to komando.com and look at her downloads. You want calibre it is a free program to organize, and change the formats on the ebooks to what you pick.
I should point out, very delicately...
...that there are completely unsupported and un-recommended "plug-ins" available for Calibre which allow one to reformat e-books one already owns into new formats, which solves one of the problems of e-books generally, the very deliberate "razor blade" problem caused by the makers of reading devices to ensure that only books sold by them function on their divisive devices, and to force one to read one's purchases through their machinations.
Here's Calibre on its own: http://calibre-ebook.com/
Look for Calibre plugins on Google and the nameless plugin thingies may appear.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
PDF Conversions
are generally awful, because PDF is a proprietary format deliberately designed to be difficult to copy, and is completely contrary to the basic principles of HTML, because it forces a relatively inflexible and content-free design-oriented paper page model upon browsers, which are defined to be value-free presenters of information content in very flexible ways. In many cases, one can make a better conversion by screen-scraping the raw text and applying basic HTML formatting by hand, which can be partially done through automation.
The ability to "scrape" the page was a concession forced upon Adobe, because their original model was completely inaccessible to blind and other visually-disabled users.
MS Word conversions are only fairly good, because MS-Word creates buckets of junk larded into their HTML conversions. A better option for MS Word is often to convert in two steps, first to RTF (another MS format) and only then by way of textedit (or other "enhanced plain text" editor) to HTML, which last conversion is usually more successful.
Calibre contains (by default) quite a bit of heuristics designed to turn raw text into something approximating "clean" markup, so the series of steps is often quite successful.
ePub documents conform to a standard, basically XHTML plus a bit of special "structure" designed to conform to how books are made and allow for easy and quick navigation. Kindle format is a butchered version of the same standard, first made by a French company called Mobipocket, later purchased by Amazon.com.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
About PDF
In defence of PDF, when it was first made available the web and HTML didn't exist. PDF was designed to ensure that what was produced using a WYSIWYG publishing program reproduced exactly the same whatever printer you used.
It was only subsequently that it has been used for on-line formatting, and not very successfully at that, given no two screens display exactly the same.
I wish people would use things how they were intended to be used, but I know that's never going to happen. I'm old enough to know that bodgery is here to stay.
Penny
PDFs vs. HTML
The PDF standard (Portable Document Format) was released as a proprietary format in 1993. It didn't become "open" until 2008.
HTML is descended from IBM's GML (Generalized Markup Language), developed in the Sixties. Since then it became SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), the standard for which was first defined in 1986. Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML in 1990, released the first informal specification in 1991, but other such markup languages existed (and were designed to exist) contemporaneously. HTML is just the one which "caught on" for use on the Internet, which succeeded ARPANET and other network protocols throughout the Sixties and Seventies. Internet itself was once an adjective, and didn't become particularized into a noun until the late Eighties and Nineties. I designed and created a GML-based ARPANET markup language in 1977, designed to allow scholarly annotations of the Joycean Corpus to be freely created, exchanged, and displayed amongst academic users at UC Berkeley, along with a "browser" with the unique ability to do full-page display on a teletype, as well as the then ubiquitous Lear Siegler ADM-3 "glass teletype." It functioned in much the same way as the Internet does today, but with a somewhat more limited audience.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
agreed on the history but...
Penny was right about part of what she said: it was never intended for display. PDF was designed for printing identically, not displaying at all, let alone identically. Reader software, and especially for the web, only came later when some fool decided it'd be a cool idea to use it for display as well.
Markup Languages, on the other hand, were inherently designed for display. Although they work for printing as well, their primary design goal was to be used as a standardized way to DISPLAY content in a fairly normalized (but not identical!) manner.
Very different purposes for existence. I wouldn't really want to try printing a .html file directly without very careful formatting controls set in the browsers print dialog, but neither do I particularly care for trying to read a .pdf file in a browser.
I do both, because software has been written to work around the design limitations, but they were never originally intended for such uses.
Abigail Drew.
Abigail Drew.
Also, is there a way to make
Samirah M. Johnstone
Table of Contents
The calibre User's Manual, located at http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/index.html , has a section on creating Tables of Contents; not having actually used calibre, I'm not sure how one would implement what is listed. Anyway, depending upon how the original document is formatted one may be able to create a hypertext Table of Contents as part of the conversion. There may be more information available in the calibre forums, which can be found from the calibre help page (which is also where I found the link to the user's manual).
Yours,
JohnBobMead
Yours,
John Robert Mead
Tables of Contents in eBooks...
...depend upon having a reliable structure. One easy way to ensure this is to create a linkable table of contents within the HTML or Word Processing file that represents the book. If your TOC actually works, you can be assured that the structure is correct.
Calibre, by default, creates a Table of Contents based upon common assumptions, although these assumptions can be changed. The most important technique to remember that will allow you to take advantage of these assumptions is to label each chapter clearly, on a single line starting with the word Chapter and followed by an arabic Chapter number. If you're using HTML, be sure that these chapter headers are enclosed in "H" (header) tags, <H2>Chapter 1</H2> for example. Also be sure that your table of contents actually links to each chapter heading. On the Kindle 3 especially, this allows one to skip through the chapters using the navigation button. You can also create multi-level TOC's, so you can have, for example, Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 1. This is beyond the scope of a short post, however.
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Online conversion to EPUB
Another simple solution to convert PDF and DOC into EPUB is offered by this site
http://www.2epub.com/
You can do your conversions online, no installation, all for free.
Tried it myself, works well