Tuesday, October 6, 2009

DX and PDF Author-Title Corrections. K1 & K2 also.

Mark Alexander recommended, in the Sheet Music comments section, the free pdftk command-line utility to modify the metadata (title, author) in PDF files before transferring them to the Kindle.  He mentions that the Kindle appears to recognize only Author and Title fields.  See Mark's instructions for modifying that data.

He wrote an extra file for use with this - "pdfmeta" - which allows one simple command to be given (shown in his guide) instead of having to make the small file with author and title info.

HOWEVER, Windows users would run any of this in a DOS window and I realize most are not comfortable with that.  In that case, you can instead try Calibre to change that type of info in a PDF.  This must be a not-easy thing to do, as Calibre's method does not work with some PDF files.  At any rate, you can choose to get Windows, Mac, or Linux versions of Calibre and there are pages for features, with screenshots.

Calibre is what I used for converting any of Google's million free ePub files to Kindle-compatible files.  Calibre can do many things.

I'll add a blog entry later for good free utilities that convert PDFs to Word files to keep some complicated formatting and then sending these to Amazon for a free conversion to Kindle format which would be emailed back to your everyday email for free so that the attached converted file can be put, via USB cable, into to your Kindle DX or Kindle 1 or 2.  Of course, we can send instead to our [us]@kindle.com address to have converted files sent to our Kindles via Whispernet but that costs 15 cents per each megabyte of a file.

  At any rate, For DX's, this conversion provides an added non-PDF file copy that can be highlighted and for which notes can be made and the Kindle inline-directory used (and the text-to-speech would work for those also, while that function doesn't work with PDFs).
  For Kindles 1 and 2, it can provide a conversion with better layout, though simple-layout PDFs with one column and almost no illustrations can be sent to your Kindle address for the usual Amazon conversion.

I'll be going on vacation, during which time I will concentrate more on Kindle tips.  If you have questions about how anything might be done, contact me and I can add it to a list of topics. Thanks! Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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