pdf-to-word-pdf-to-html-chm-to-html 09may09 john pfeiffer
Converting between formats is one of the most common modern problems. PDF is a wonderful method for almost universal content presentation. Unfortunately it doesn't scale well to small screens and there are many different implementations of the pdf "standard".
MS Word .doc and .docx are clunky kludgy formats that happen to be readable to a large number of people (e.g. MS windows + MS Office). Unfortunately they have large file sizes, are not very portable to other OS' and are a mess to convert.
chm is "compressed html ala microsoft" which if you have files with some interesting content must be converted to something portable/usable.
mobipocket is a proprietary "ebook" standard designed with portable small screen devices in mind. Since the reader is free and install on MS based OS handhelds there is a good reason to want to convert things into
Here are the apps that wil make your conversions:
mobicreator.msi -> converts pdf into html before making a .prc (doubly useful!) e.g. high compression 1.5MB to 809KB
You can take the html & images from mobicreator and use them as the source for ReaderWorks Standard 2.0 which makes a .lit with the images embedded...
Better than below is ABClit (2.08) which converts ... ConvertLit can take a .lit book that doesn't have any graphics and make it into text (best with Haali reader) (extract makes an .opf and .html slides)
nitro pdf -> does a good job of going from pdf to Word or pdf to text (but formatting can look funny)
It's important to identify whether your source document has images (that you want to keep) - if so you'll need .lit or .pdf or .html
If it's pure text then Haali reader is your best choice. You can often convert .pdf to .html or .doc/.rtf and then just copy and paste all of the text into a notepad.
Be prepared to do a little manual fiddling - break the document up into 1MB chunks if the reader chokes when opening them.
Reformat .html so that if you use a browser to view it (pictures will not auto resize) then it "reflows" ok for the smaller screen.
HANDHELD DEVICE READER SOFTWARE
Haali reader (great text reader) MS Lit Reader (can do graphics but requires .lit format) MS Word (does an ok job) Web Browser (if your web content is scalable then it works...) Adobe Reader (only useful if you can "reflow" your pdf's) MobiReader (text only)
In order to have a selection of readings (1 study, 1 work related, 1 news)
MS Lit Reader (for anything with graphics?) Haali reader (for long text) MobiReader (for text but can do hyperlinks as well) Browser IE (for resized graphics/reflowed text and hyperlinks) (note it takes a lot of memory and a long time to load)