Anyone test sideloaded PDFs?

[AlexQwerty]

Just wondering if anyone has had their nook long enough to try sideloding some PDFs and see how well they reflow, etc? How about math equations?

[steve10]

I've created and downloaded several and they seem to flow fine.  These are all admittedly fairly simple files, created by printing news articles.  But I just went and created one with a number of math equations and it works well there too.

The big problem you're going to find is that:

1) the name of the PDF is generated from an internal name embedded when the PDF was created, so it depends on the application creating it.  If I print the PDF from the browser, it's the URL of the page, which isn't very useful.  From Microsoft Word, it's "Microsoft Word - <document name>" which is a little better.

2) In spite of prior claims to the contrary by some responses on these message boards, and in spite of the documentation in the user guide, there is currently no way to search My Documents other than browsing through the list.  The search, sort, and filter capability is only on the Library, on the eBooks.

And although you can have subfolders under My Documents, all the content of the subfolders appears as a flat list in My Documents.

I'll work around that for now by keeping My Documents small, but I sure hope they come out with major improvements in this area in the near future.

[knickerhawk]

The big problem you're going to find is that:

1) the name of the PDF is generated from an internal name embedded when the PDF was created, so it depends on the application creating it.  If I print the PDF from the browser, it's the URL of the page, which isn't very useful.  From Microsoft Word, it's "Microsoft Word - <document name>" which is a little better.

2) In spite of prior claims to the contrary by some responses on these message boards, and in spite of the documentation in the user guide, there is currently no way to search My Documents other than browsing through the list.  The search, sort, and filter capability is only on the Library, on the eBooks.

Regarding pdfs generated from webpages, open the pdf in Acrobat and right click anywhere on the page and then select Document Properties (or press Ctrl-D in Windows).   Change the Title field to whatever you want it to be and then click OK and do a File Save to commit the change.   Let us know if that works.  If it does, be aware that you can also get to the Document Properties and edit the Title in Windows Explorer by right clicking on the document and selecting Properties.  A useful trick is to add the Title Property as a column to be displayed in your Explorer view.  Just right-click on the column header row and select the Title field as one of the visible columns.  This way you can quickly scan the contents of the folder to see which files have useless (or missing) titles that should be edited.  I wonder what the Nook does when there's no value in the Title field.  You might try deleting one and see if it then defaults to the file name instead.

Regarding the missing search functionality in My Documents, the documentation says it can be done but then just abruptly ends after the description of how to browse  My Documents.  It's as if it was intended feature but didn't get done in time.  My guess is that it will be added in with a firmware update at some point.

Thanks for sharing your first impressions.

[knickerhawk]

1) the name of the PDF is generated from an internal name embedded when the PDF was created, so it depends on the application creating it.  If I print the PDF from the browser, it's the URL of the page, which isn't very useful.  From Microsoft Word, it's "Microsoft Word - <document name>" which is a little better.

2) In spite of prior claims to the contrary by some responses on these message boards, and in spite of the documentation in the user guide, there is currently no way to search My Documents other than browsing through the list.  The search, sort, and filter capability is only on the Library, on the eBooks.

[Rutter9]

I've tried all sorts of PDFs and have no problems with them. This is the reason I wanted this ereader and am very glad it works as I was hoping! Refresh rate is fast, not instant, but fast!

[AlexQwerty]

Thanks for the responses. Good PDF support on an ereader is what I've been waiting for, and it looks like nook might have what it takes.

[andyd]

Got my nook yesterday, and loaded up PDFs immediately (cause that's one of my primary concerns, too).  Wish I could agree with everyone here that it worked well, but so far I'm really disappointed.  I had created a PDF by printing a web page to pdf.  The reader only showed the first sentence on each page.  The rest of the page was blank.  The pdf looks fine on the PC.

Then I loaded a technical ebook that I had purchased online a few months ago, and the reader won't open it at all (again, opens fine on the PC).

I like the reader just fine, but I'm disappointed about my lack of PDF success so far...

[andyd]

Well, maybe I spoke too soon.  The pdf that wouldn't load at all had some special characters in the file name (like %20). I took those out and it seems to load fine now.

[GDio]

I just received my nook yesterday. The main reason for purchasing was to load PDF manuals I have.  I am in the Real estate business and read several PDF ebooks.  I loaded through Windows explorer, the files show in the My Documents folder in windows, but nothing on the nook.  If this won't read a standard PDF file, it has no use to me.

[Chiclitz]

---

GDio wrote:

I just received my nook yesterday. The main reason for purchasing was to load PDF manuals I have.  I am in the Real estate business and read several PDF ebooks.  I loaded through Windows explorer, the files show in the My Documents folder in windows, but nothing on the nook.  If this won't read a standard PDF file, it has no use to me.

---

All PDFs are not created equal. Or at least they can be created using different source file types and with different reading applications in mind. I found this out last night after sideloading a bunch of PDF and EPUB files that I accumulated from the net while waiting for my nook (which, by the bye, is one sexy damn e-reader) to arrive. The short response to your post is that you have to reformat the files (using something like Calibre or Adobe Digital Editions) to get them closer to the nook's specs (for want of an accurate word), and reformatting is a little time consuming but relatively painless.

I also loaded thorugh Windows Explorer because Calibre has no formatting pre-sets for the nook yet and because I left my Adobe login info on my PC at work. What I noticed was that the PDF files that I used displayed  widely divergent formatting. Some text allegedly displayed in Amassi (?) Medium would be enormous (as in 12 words per screen), yet switching to Amassi Small reformatted the text so small as to be unreadable. I believe the problem is that several of these PDFs were originally formatted to work on machines with fairly small screens (as in iPhones) and that, try as it might, the nook just couldn't correctly translate the metadata that it needed for displaying and overflowing text on its screen. An equally annoying problem is that, without converting, you'll have no idea what metadata the nook will use to display as Author/Title info on the My Documents screen: I got everything from my own name to a fairly extensive file path.

On the EPUB side of this coin, I noticed that several of of those files (they were digital versions of fat, unabridged novels like "War and Peace") displayed chapter links rather than chapters full of text or displayed the entire set of chapter links before any of the actual text. No real surprise there since EPUB files are basically XML/HTML files at heart, but the nook occasionally ran into problems with opening up a link: an error message about wanting to force quit the file would pop up, and two options (Force Quit or Wait) would show up on the touch screen. If I selected "Wait" the nook would eventually (in 5-10 seconds) catch up with itself and open the link. But, again, the display was erratic. Sadly this was even true of EPUBs that I downloaded directly from Project Gutenberg, files that I was hoping I could use without worrying about formatting.

The good news here, though, is that you can reformat and/or debug the files using Calibre and end up with far more consistent results. I was especially happy to discover that Calibre does a respectable job of converting Project Gutenberg TXT files into EPUBs. It will also debug and convert HTML files: I converted two SS VanDine Philo Vance novels from HTML to EPUB and the only real issue that I have with them is that they dim down the E-Ink display because they were originally formatted with color backgrounds that have to be grayscaled on the nook. Files converted via Calibre also seem to contain chapter information that is accessible from the "Go To" button on the touch screen.

Over the next day or so I want to try running files through Adobe Digital Editions in order to compare that output to Calibre's output. For now, because Calibre does not recognize the nook as a distinct e-reader type, I've been working with the Default settings in Calibre and, as I mentioned, loading via Windows Explorer. If the Calibre project releases a rebuild that includes nook-specific formatting information, then the output files may increase in quality, consistency, and adaptability, and the conversion process may end up a one-click procedure.

Here's the URL for Calibre. It's free and open source and mighty handy:

http://calibre-ebook.com/

[Chiclitz]

---

GDio wrote:

  I loaded through Windows explorer, the files show in the My Documents folder in windows, but nothing on the nook.

---

I almost forgot. You have to "Check for New Content" on the touchscreen to refresh the My Documents screen.

And, yes, I'll stop typing now.

[C8H10N4O2]

Thanks for the above two posts.  I don't have a nook in-hand yet, but I would imagine when it does get in-hand, this will be invaluable information.

[steve10]

Regarding pdfs generated from webpages, open the pdf in Acrobat and right click anywhere on the page and then select Document Properties (or press Ctrl-D in Windows).   Change the Title field to whatever you want it to be and then click OK and do a File Save to commit the change.   Let us know if that works.  If it does, be aware that you can also get to the Document Properties and edit the Title in Windows Explorer by right clicking on the document and selecting Properties.  A useful trick is to add the Title Property as a column to be displayed in your Explorer view.  Just right-click on the column header row and select the Title field as one of the visible columns.  This way you can quickly scan the contents of the folder to see which files have useless (or missing) titles that should be edited.  I wonder what the Nook does when there's no value in the Title field.  You might try deleting one and see if it then defaults to the file name instead.

What version of Acrobat are you using?  I see the title but I can't modify it.  I'm pretty sure that would work if I could change the title.  That's clearly where it's picking up the name of the document it displays.  I also did as you suggest by displaying the Title column in Windows Explorer, but it does not display the title embedded in the PDF.  It comes up blank on all files.

[steve10]

Also, I did just try a PDF that has no embedded title.  It happened to be a user guide for another device.  In this case, it used the file name.   So, if I can either modify or delete the embedded title, I can have user friendly names for PDF files.  

[steve10]

I'll add that as Chiclitz pointed out, not all PDFs are created equal.  In particular for my purposes, large PDFs are only easily navigable if they're properly bookmarked by the author.  In other words, if they haven't taken the effort to do that, all you can do is scroll from one page to the next, or do finds on words.  But if they have bookmarked key locations (e.g. chapters) in the PDF, then the Nook will leverage them in the Go To | Chapter functionality.

[Chiclitz]

Steve10--

Thanks for that (I assume) quoted passage about editing files in Acrobat. I never remember that I have access to Acrobat Professional on my PC. I've seen online references to generating EPUB files using Adobe InDesign as well. I'm hoping to get to play with that over the Christmas holidays.

[steve10]

Chiclitz, yes, sorry, I was quoting your statement, thus the indentation but I should have marked it as such to make that clear.

Acrobat Pro is a little out of my price range but I found another cheaper PDF editor (PDF Suite) that did the trick.  For some reason a ? shows up on the Nook after the title I entered in the editor, but I can live with that if I can't figure out how to eliminate it.  Thanks for you suggestions.

[nookfan11]

All,

The PDF's that I've loaded have all worked great.  They are fast, and show properly.  It must have something to do with specific pdfs.

nookfan

[MikeMorrissey]

I was having issues as well trying to rename PDF files.  I downloaded PDF Info which is free.

[LJGeiger]

Thank you! Editing the file properties and changing the filename to something user friendly has solved this problem for me!

Lisa G.

[AkilahR]

Can't zoom on PDF's, which is essential for a lot of the image-based documents I have. So for me, although PDF support exists, it is almost useless.