Kindle and Pdfs

Ah the lovely Kindle and Pdfs issue.

Yes you can email it to your kindle address (found on your kindle account page for those of you wondering where the heck it is)

But in the case of those old pdfs that do not have OCR searchable (OCRS) then um...welllllll
so yep we are talking pdf to pdf conversion (try a search on that and good luck)
So I have used various pdf conversion utilities,
PDF Creator (kind of kewl as it adds a pdf creator toolbar to your browser if you request and you can convert web pages. I use Firefox btw)
Primo PDF--this one has an ebook optimizor in it also creates a pdf printer
PDF to Word Doc Convertor creates a pdf printer if you go with this you might want to get a text editor called PFE32
Desktop PDF
Create Adobe PDF online ( 10 per month subscription fee after the 5 trials).

All of these converters are adequate for converting to pdfs or to converting pdfs to text as long as the pdfs are the newer versions.

The issue is when it is the older version. Adobe PDF online lets me optimize for books, rotates the pages so that they all face forward. It is not the most perfect but in converting old pdfs to new pdfs. It worked the best for me. I have not decided what to do yet. I will probably update my Creative Suite when I purchase a new laptop, but all of this is money and I'm in school and not really working lucratively yet.

If you are using new pdfs, then once you convert them you will be able to change the font size on the Kindle display screen.

I use MobiPocket creator to convert. To convert a pdf.

Click on the Adobe pdf icon on the right side of the screen. I create my publications in folder D:\mobi. You could create it directly in the Kindle directory Documents, but it does add extra files needed for the conversion to html.
Click the upper browse button and locate the pdf file you want to convert.
Click Import
Once you see the file converted
Click on the Build Icon at the top of the MobiCreator Screen.
Click OK
The error message is usually you did not put a cover in. You can use any image you want for the cover, I usually just leave it alone.
Once you click ok, it should open up the folder the file is in. Click on the file and open it in MobiReader.

Because of my older pdf issues, I also have the MobiReader installed and I click on the .prc file and look at it in the reader. This saves me from having to unplug the Kindle look to see what the file looks like etc.
f you like how it looks great. If not then you can always convert the pdf to text. And edit it. (this is where the PFE32 comes in handy. It has more capabilities than Notepad without the issues that wordpad or word creates.

There is a great tutorial called HarryT's Mobipocket Tutorial.

I probably will spend the 10 bucks to convert the pdfs I have now via Adobe as for pdf to pdf conversion it is the best, although not perfect, as rows and columns do get confused.

Eventually I will post the mobi files using Python and another blogger's downloadable kindle py files.