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Show HN: PDFlower – Reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading
- eb0la 10y agoThat's the feature Kindle PDF reader should have built in from beginning. Waiting in the queue for my account.
- diab0lic 10y agoUnfortunately the kindle is optimizing for users buying Amazon content, not for being the best general purpose eReader. This incentive mismatch between Amazon and the end users is probably why we will never see such a feature built in.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoIf you jailbreak your Kindle and install Koreader (mentioned upstream) you can have high quality PDF reflow, with support for two-column layouts as well as math and displayed equations, on your Kindle today. Here are some example images: http://www.epubor.com/how-to-install-and-use-koreader-on-kindle.html http://www.epubor.com/how-to-install-and-use-koreader-on-kin...
- ComputerGuru 10y agoWow, that's quite the (both) useable and useful software - thank you for the link. I'm not normally part of the "x should buy this out" group, but in this case, Amazon really should.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoNo, they shouldn't - because if it goes against their business interest (having Amazon-bought books look better than manually uploaded content), they'll shut the project down.
- dublinben 10y agoThe only reason this software is any good is specifically because it isn't controlled by Amazon. This functionality is very deliberately missing from the stock Kindle.
- diab0lic 10y agoHey, thanks for this! I'm traveling today but I'll give this a shot tomorrow. I'd be much happier if I could read scientific papers on my eReader.
- unicornporn 10y ago> Q: If it still work when update the firmware version? > Kindle jailbreak will survive when updated to the last firmware, such as 5.7.3. But you need to reinstall KUAL and Koreader to use it again. Does firmware auto update on the Kindles? If so, will this break at any time?
- maxcan 10y agoIt has it, but the feature is a bit hidden. Use your email-to-kindle email address and send a PDF with "convert" as the subject line.
- chengchang 10y agoThe majority of scientific and technical papers are delivered by the PDF file for portable presentation. However, it difficult to read the PDF paper on small screen devices, such as tablets and eBook readers. So I wrote PDFlower to reflow PDF papers for small-screen reading. Compared with plain-text extraction based tools, PDFlower reconstructs the object level - columns, formulas, tables and figures - layout using some smart heuristics, and then renders them for new page size.
- lmg643 10y agowhy do we need to create an account to try it out?
- wccrawford 10y agoReading the page, it looks like your document gets put into a queue for processing, and then you can download it after. I imagine they wanted to avoid all the hassles of emails, as well as having accounts to prime the system if they decide to enhance it as a for-pay service. It probably also stops assholes from using the service on PDFlower's dime for their own needs.
- halomru 10y agoThere are plenty of services that put my job in a queue and simply update the page via JavaScript to show progress and deliver the end result. The better implementations identify me via session cookie and recognize me when I check back half an hour later to get my results. That's a much nicer experience than creating another account at some random service that I might never visit again.
- ericmo 10y agoExample pictures are kind of small, hard to see the quality of the result. Also, I'd use this for a Kindle device, not an iPad, so it'd be also good to see how it looks in a Kindle.
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- aw3c2 10y agoDoes anyone know an open-source solution for this? What I read is no one's business and I would never used a web-hosted service for something like this.
- anotheryou 10y agoandroid closed-source payed app that does reflow: ezPDF Reader
- hwh 10y agok2pdfopt: http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ We use that engine in the OSS KoReader application.
- ericmo 10y agoHow does it compare to PDFLower?
- tedunangst 10y agoThe last time I tried to build k2pdfopt, the source zip was missing a bunch of files. You had to download another zip, which wasn't complete either, and combine the results. And then the build failed because cmake was having a bad hair day. I wanted to like it since the windows exe did seem very handy, but had to give up at that point. (Oh, wait, there was a bit more. I did get it building, but the source assumed fprintf(NULL, "log msg") was a perfectly fine thing to do. That's when I gave up.)
- krzyk 10y agoI'm trying right now to build it from source, and I'm astonished that it doesn't come with automake tools. I'm pretty much used to all the sources to work with "./configure && make", and have a BUILDING.txt or INSTALL.txt. k2pdfopt doesn't have any of this.
- ocharles 10y agohttps://www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/~somchai/cut2col/ https://www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/~somchai/cut2col/
- towelrod 10y agoInteresting and I might have a use for this professionally. But there is no indication on the main page about how it works (web service? code library?). And it forced me to login on the second page, so I closed the tab.
- chrismorgan 10y agoAh, reminds me of the Celery tool Flower, pronounced flow-er rather than flour. How is this one supposed to be pronounced?
- daphreak 10y agoI would like a "pricing" and a "privacy policy" link on the front page. Probably won't spend time trying it out due to the omission. Luckily there are interesting self-hosted / local options mentioned in this thread.
- franciscop 10y agoExactly the same here. I won't go through the [maybe] lengthy process of creating a new account to get a paywall then. Same goes with the privacy policy, I don't want to use it with my own PDFs and lose their rights or with other people's and screw things legally.
- adrianh 10y agoIf you're interested in doing this for sheet music (sort of a similar-ish problem), check out my product soundslice.com. Auto-reflowed sheet music depending on your device width.
- nmca 10y agoJust want to comment that if this worked well I would pay for it. Probably up to ~5 or maybe even 10 dollars a month.
- ldenoue 10y agoI'm working on a similar system. Would you like to test it? https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713 https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713
- estrabd 10y agoI just want something that'll collapse 2 columns into 1.
- saint-loup 10y agoAdobe Reader has a little-known function similar to this. Go to Display > Zoom > distribute (the last entry). It works reasonably well with simple, clean documents. You can check wether the document is compatible in its property panel.
- ldenoue 10y agoI'm also working on this PDF reflow and posted a video demonstration on my twitter. Ping me if you would like to test: https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713 https://twitter.com/ldenoue/status/785142066665971713
- edgartaor 10y agoI thought I'd give it a try. But... Signup Queue? I had never seen anything like that. Signup Queue Hi, <my_email> * You are on your way to PDFlower. * 269 people in front of you. * 0 people behind of you. * Sharing this referral link may change your position in queue. Have a try. <referral_link>
- wccrawford 10y agoI've seen that before. It's a pathetic attempt to force viral sharing. I never participate on principle.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- israrkhan 10y agowould be great, if you could provide a guest account to try it out. I closed the window as soon as I saw the signup form..
- anigbrowl 10y agoVery cool. How hard would it be to go in the opposite direction? When I'm using a desktop or a laptop computer it's most annoying that almost all news sites, blogs, eg. optimize for a portrait orientation. I can only see a relatively small amount of text so I have to scroll constantly, despite the acres of available whitespace to either side. It's really annoying when reading anything complex where you'd want to refer back to previous sentences or paragraphs frequently to make sure you've understood the substance properly. I would love to be able to reflow into 3 or 4 columns though...
- chengchang 10y agoThanks for your comment. The PDF format will ignore some structures of paper and `draw` contents on a fixed-layout flat document. For a char, e-readers cannot know it belongs a paragraph, a figure caption or a formula. Plus, publishers render original paper with the specific style. It is a problem. Some research concentrate to improve PDF format, extract infos for scholarly papers, like articles on DocEng - a compute science conference: http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE135 http://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE135. Then I read the spec of PDF format... Anyway, that's hurt.
- MidoAssran 10y agoCool concept. This should be built into all smartphones and tablets and automatically run when they open PDFs.
- scivey7 10y agoThis is something I haven't found an ideal solution for yet. There are existing iOS PDF readers with reflow, but each seems to have its own issues. To echo what others have said, this is an actual pain point and I'm very willing to spend money on a solid solution. I've bought a few different PDF readers just on the chance their reflow would be better than what I've found elsewhere. So I clicked on your link pretty ready to throw money at you, but I'm not sure what I'm looking at. Is this an iOS app? Android app? It seems like some kind of service, since it wants me to login, but I can't tell. Consider working on the messaging and then reposting this. There's definitely a market.
- yaroslavyar 10y agoCould you please name it?