Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Paste website info to DOCs, or Print to PDFs with CutePdf

Am updating a blog entry I made April 3, with added information.

Print webpage info to PDFs with the CutePdf utility, which is free.
 You can then email these new PDFs to [you]@kindle.com (direct to your Kindle).   As of May 4, 2009 Amazon charges 15c per megabyte per file, rounded up, to send one of your personal documents direct to your Kindle, after a conversion if needed.

 You can instead email items to [you]@free.kindle.com -- which remains free -- and then usb-cable the converted files to your Kindle or Kindle DX.

  While I take notes for myself about interesting utilities, I hadn't tried CutePdf until that April blog entry.  Interested in website info about a destination, I printed the pages to CutePdf and it made a pdf out of that - text and maps together. Both Kindles can enlarge map images now. Highly recommended.

  But that works best with less complex ad-light pages.
  For more complex pages (multi-column, for example), you can Highlight text you want, Copy it, open up Microsoft WORD and Paste to a new blank document what you copied and save the file.

  The WORD Doc file can then be sent to [you]@kindle.com, etc., and Amazon will send it back, converted for the Kindle.  That's just one of many ways to do it.

Be sure to set up a [you]@kindle.com address first, of course.  This is done at your Amazon "Manage Your Kindle" page.  Here's a guide for using that management page.

HOWEVER
While PDFs of web-page articles can be useful to have on the Kindle (for example, for information on a place you're visiting) and you can choose easily-readable Black and White in the 'properties' of the print job that goes to CutePdf, the original links in the article are not active in these PDFs, as the Kindle cursor doesn't access lines in PDFs.

On the Kindle Global 6" the device normally would have to be rotated to Landscape orientation to be able to read PDF-page text more easily, as they're usually set up for 8-1/2" x 11" paper.

Many won't want to follow links on the Kindle wireless/Whispernet, but it can be done even if it's slow.

SELECTING TEXT FOR KINDLE FILE
I find it better to highlight portions of the article -- usually the middle text area, ignoring ads and links at the sides -- and copy and paste those to a program like Microsoft WORD, which handles photos along with the words and produces a layout similar to the original.  The hyperlinks stay intact this way too.

In WORD, after you've pasted the text & photos over, you can do a Ctrl-A to highlight ALL of it (maybe Cmd-A on Macs) and then pull the outer, right margin in, to about '70' to get text that won't wrap oddly on the Kindle.  On the other hand, Amazon's conversion program will just wrap it for the screen margins anyway.

While the highlighting mentioned is still active for those paragraphs, you can also increase the font if you want a larger font to show up under the "default" font of font step 3.

Then save the file as [whatever].doc and send it either to your Kindle by using [you]@kindle.com,for about 15c for direct send to your Kindle since articles will generally be under 1 meg, or send it to [you]@free.kindle.com ... Amazon will convert the WORD doc file to Amazon's Kindle format of mobi/AZW. These usually look pretty good.

Those preferring to do their own conversions of WORD doc files to Amazon Kindle 'mobi' or 'prc' format can use Mobipocket Creator (free) to do that.  But it's faster to just let Amazon do it.  The [you]@free.kindle.com conversion and send-back is quite fast and doesn't cost you anything. 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.

Send to Kindle


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