[ubuntu-uk] file conv question: pdf to prc?

[Robert McWilliam]

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 10:36:15PM +0100, Javad Ayaz wrote:
> hi
> anyone know how i can convert a pdf file to a prc file in buntu or online?

What do you actually mean by prc file? Some quick googling found three
options: corel presentation file, palm resource control (usually an
executable, sometimes used for ebooks) and mobipocket ebook file. Any
of those is a possibility for what you want I suppose, with the
mobipocket ebook being the most probable. I found a couple of programs
that would read mobipocket ebooks on Linux but nothing that'll write
them, http://www.angelfire.com/ego2/idleloop/mbp_reader.html has some
details on the format that might be enough to get a quick script
together to wrap some text in the right format for the reader, the
more of the formatting you want to keep the more work that'll
be. Mobipocket do offer free as in beer creation tools for windows. 

Is this for getting pdfs onto your phone? If so I had an idea about
that: there are tools to convert pdfs to HTML (pdftohtml) or plain
text (pdftotext) and some other formats (I use pdftoppm every so often
to pull diagrams out of lecture notes) and GIMP can read pdfs and save
them in any image format you like. Images are a bit of a pain on a
small screen as you'll probably end up scrolling around a lot as the
text wont reflow to fit (though you have the same problem with the
original pdfs), but dumping the text out to plain text or HTML looses
a lot of the formatting. Which is best probably depends on the files
you're working with.  

Hopefully some of that will help,
	  Robert

________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam     rmcw at allmail.net    www.ormiret.com

People who think they know what they are doing are especially annoying
to those of us who do.