Odd Lots
- I’m not very good at one-liners. So, in my contrarian fashion, I will present an Odd Lots composed entirely of…two-liners.
- Technical material (textbooks, manuals, computer books) rendered on an ebook reader? Now you’re talking.
- As someone fond of both astronomy (especially telescopes) and Star Wars, I consider this a wonderful building hack.
- Harrison Bergeron was evidently a Canadian kid soccer player. (Thanks to Bob Trembley for the link.)
- What’s your favorite app for extracting text from PDFs? Any experience with ABBYY’s PDF Transformer?
- And if you’re going the other way, slow but sure pays off: PDFCreator has finally reached version 1.0, after only seven years.
- Sigil is the only WYSIWIYG editor for EPUB-format ebooks. Why? When will we start editing ebooks and stop coding them?
- One of my cousins once had a sandbox in an enormous worn-out tractor tire. Now somebody’s recycled such a tire into a bike.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: culture · ebooks · humor · software
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Abbyy allows their products to be downloaded for a trial. So you can try Transformer in a VM.
There’s also xPDF from http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/about.html. xPDF is a collection of command line utilities released under the GPL. One of the utilities, pdftotext, does a very good job of extracting text from PDF files. Output goes to std-out. This allows the tool to be scripted. Other programs, including Abbyy’s PDF Transformer do not allow one to easily script the process.
Mike Allen
I’ve been using Google Docs PDF output > Calibre EPUB, but there are “issues”, at least with what I view on the B&N Nook. Still experimenting.