Jesse Vincent keeps improving Savory. He’s made converted PDFs look absolutely stellar. The changes he made to Savory to enable this, in his own words -
… people want to be able to view rendered PDFs that look “like they’re supposed to”
Savory’s initial release used a PDF-to-HTML converter that extracts the text from a PDF and turns it into a reflowable ebook. If your PDFs are generated from text by modern tools, this is great. Most PDFs aren’t.Over the weekend, I put together a PDF renderer for Savory built on Poppler and the Kindle’s built in Manga support (If you have a .zip or .cbz file full of images, the Kindle will display the images like a book)For now, every PDF is converted twice. Once to text and once to a set of rendered images
And the screenshots show some pretty cool features -
- Formulas keep their formatting.
- Figures show up where they’re supposed to.
- Since they’re images – You can rotate the view. You can do Fit To Screen view. Zoom works.
The question that comes to mind is whether this will become a viable way to do conversion for other formats?
Here’s a picture which I’m sure he won’t mind me using since I’m sending him a lot of traffic.
Savory++
You can check out the Savory screenshots here. And you can get the new Savory source code here.
I still feel that Amazon won’t be happy about Savory extending Kindle to non-Amazon controlled formats. Interesting to see what happens next and whether Amazon closes down the Kindle 2.
Adobe and Stanza are writing up formal ‘OPDS’ format documents and blog posts while Mr. Vincent already has a working on-Kindle PDF converter. Gotta love the Internet.
Filed under: extensions Tagged: | savory, savory kindle
this is somewhat off topic but… do you (or anyone reading this) know of a good way to convert unprotected .lit files to something kindle-friendly? what ive seen involves a lot of jumping through hoops and multiple format conversions, which is too much of a pain for me to bother with… id like a one-step kind of thing, if such a thing exists…
I’m very excited about Savory but still too much of a technophobe to try it out myself. I’m one of those people who panic the second they see a line of code or an MS-DOS prompt. I know a disclaimer about the possibility of the Kindle losing function is necessary just in case, but it’s scary. Am I being overly cautious?
Hard to say – for me, being in canada means any problems and getting the K2 working again might be a huge problem. That means I won’t try.
It’s a difficult question.
radio_babylon,
Unprotected LIT is a format supported by Calibre:
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/
I’ve only converted one LIT for Kindle using Calibre thus far, and it worked very well for that book.
Calibre can now also email the converted books directly to your Kindle.
[...] один материал http://ireaderreview.com/2009/04/08/savory-adds-amazingly-good-pdf-conversion-for-kindle/Да и в http://e-bookvine.com/?p=154 нашлись интересные [...]
Хм… что-то у меня ссылка не открывается, которую указали. Это у всех так, или только у меня?