Author Topic: Reading the preorder PDFs on the Kindle / Phones -- Briss  (Read 1691 times)

Offline Ran

  • Participant
  • *
  • Posts: 12
    • View Profile
Reading the preorder PDFs on the Kindle / Phones -- Briss
« on: May 31, 2010, 11:10:06 PM »
Maybe this can help someone else... :) I have no connection with this program aside from googling for something similar and using it a few days ago.

I was trying to read the digital versions on the kindle, and wow, that font was tiny! I could barely make it out. I went looking for a program I'd used before that cropped PDFs and turned them into images, but I found something much better:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/

The program I found, Briss, is a cross-platform program that'll show you all of your pages overlayed at once, even and odd, and you can draw rectangles. It exports as a cropped PDF file. I found going from the section name to the page number kept almost all of the margin notes, and that the cool center binding effect could be removed painlessly.

There's an option where you can draw columns, too, and it will make them into the right kind of pages -- but I didn't use that. The font is only a tiny bit bigger without the margins, but it made a huge difference to me; I can have the Kindle show the entire page at once and the normal text is no problem for me. (My eyes aren't good enough for some of the cursive on the example sheets, though; I have to rotate it to Landscape mode for that.)

I've also used the resulting files on my smartphone, an N900 -- it was gorgeous in landscape, and I preferred it to the Kindle except for a problem showing highlighted lines. I still can't wait for the hardcovers to arrive in the mail, but this makes it much easier for me to read in the meantime. :D

Offline Saedar

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 333
    • View Profile
Re: Reading the preorder PDFs on the Kindle / Phones -- Briss
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2010, 01:00:32 AM »
I had tried to do something similar on a nook and it was horrible.

Works like a charm on IPad, though.

Offline Wordmaker

  • Conversationalist
  • **
  • Posts: 917
  • Paul Anthony Shortt
    • View Profile
    • Paul Anthony Shortt's Blog
Re: Reading the preorder PDFs on the Kindle / Phones -- Briss
« Reply #2 on: June 01, 2010, 07:45:55 AM »
The books work fine on my iPod Touch, though it runs out of memory if I change pages too rapidly.

Offline Erifnogard

  • Lurker
  • Posts: 6
    • View Profile
Re: Reading the preorder PDFs on the Kindle / Phones -- Briss
« Reply #3 on: June 02, 2010, 02:43:34 PM »
I read them using Good Reader on my iPhone with no problems.

Offline pfloyd

  • Participant
  • *
  • Posts: 60
  • Team Dresden
    • View Profile
Re: Reading the preorder PDFs on the Kindle / Phones -- Briss
« Reply #4 on: June 09, 2010, 09:54:17 PM »
I'm waiting for the iOS 4.0 update for my iPhone and the iBook feature, since it will read PDF files. Handy for when I'm on vacation.

I don't think Stanza will read them, so that's why I have to just sit and wait...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that." -- Douglas Adams