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Radioclare’s tac log 2015 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
Tags: Macedonian | Serbian | Serbo-Croatian | Croatian | Esperanto | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5043 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 153 of 292 28 April 2015 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I may be able to help you radioclare. First- a bunch of "ifs". If the pdf's are simply formatted- i.e: not two columns or poorly scanned with text that is ocr'ed (text with characters made optically recognizable by a computer) you are in luck. How you can tell if a text has been ocr'ed is by trying to copy a stretch of text and paste it somewhere. If it pastes in a legible fashion, Bob's your uncle. You'll need to download a free, open-source, program called Calibre. Calibre allows you to easily convert a pdf file to mobi format. You can even search the web for cover images and import them in the conversion process.
If the pdf's have not been ocr'ed, you can use a pdf editing program to do that. I have official adobe software which makes it easy and it has been well worth every penny I paid for it over the years. There are also lower cost and perhaps free alternatives out there. With a good pdf editing software you can crop the pages to make them appear bigger on an e-ink screen or read them in landscape instead of portrait format. If you have a tablet style kindle, or just a tablet, cropping is not necessary. What I have described may seem complicated, but once you do it a few times it is really quite easy and quick. With languages like Haitian Creole and Ladino, there are no e-books unless I make them myself. Mind you, there isn't an integrated pop-up dictionary for them on the kindle but I can still take notes on it and save words for later easily. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5017 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 154 of 292 29 April 2015 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||
If you are going to do 90 of them, then I suggest you download calibre, those online things I told you would take forever. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 155 of 292 29 April 2015 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you both for the advice :) All the pdfs I have seem to already be OCR'd, which is
good news. I've downloaded Calibre and just waiting for it to convert the files now. Think it might take a while to get through all 90 even without doing it online! Will be interesting to see how readable the results are :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5017 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 156 of 292 30 April 2015 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
If you use linux conversion is easy. Put them all in the same directory and run this command. for a in `ls *.pdf`; do ebook-convert $a `basename $a .pdf`.epub; done :D EDIT: Being a sad git, I went away and worked out how to do this in windows. 1) open a cmd shell, (press start then type cmd and press return, you should get a little black box) 2) change directory to where your books are. cd \users\documents (or whatever) 3) run this command: for %A in (dir *.pdf) do ebook-convert %A %A.epub That will loop through and change all PDF files to EPUB files, assuming calibre's ebook-convert.exe is in your path. If not you might need to do something like: for %A in (dir *.pdf) do "C:\program files\calibre\bin\ebook-convert" %A %A.epub The problem is that it will convert FRED.PDF to FRED.PDF.epub but hey... it is windows. Edited by rdearman on 30 April 2015 at 12:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 157 of 292 30 April 2015 at 11:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Erm, I went for the non-technical approach of opening Calibre, highlighting the pdfs and pressing the "convert" button... is the more complicated way better?
I started reading one of them this morning and it's fine except that the line spacing is all funny, so there is about a line and a half of text, then a blank space, then a line and a half of text, then a blank space etc. Guessing this happens because the length of lines is different in the pdf to what they need to be in the mobi file. I think it's still an improvement on reading the pdf file though because the text is a decent size :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5017 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 158 of 292 30 April 2015 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
LOL... your solution is better! I'm just a commandline junkie. I think you can set some parameters to adjust the lines. I don't know how to set them in the GUI interface. But on the commandline they are: --pretty-print (If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible.) --mobi-ignore-margins (Ignore margins in the input document.) --mobi-file-type (By default calibre generates MOBI files that contain the old MOBI 6 format. This format is compatible with all devices. However, by changing this setting, you can tell calibre to generate MOBI files that contain both MOBI 6 and the new KF8 format, or only the new KF8 format. KF8 has more features than MOBI 6, but only works with newer Kindles.) You should have some kinda tickboxes for these options. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 159 of 292 30 April 2015 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you, that makes sense :) My Calibre is still busy converting the 90 pdfs but
when it's finished I will investigate the different parameters in more detail. Not achieved much so far this week, except for reading more of "Reketaš"; I'm got through another 86 pages since I last posted. I'm enjoying it, but can't see how the story is going to end. 6WC starts tomorrow and I can't decide whether to sign up. Given my complete failure to make time for Macedonian, registering with it could either give me the kick I need to do some work or just make me completely depressed when I fail to achieve anything at all :D I also have so much stuff that I still want to achieve with Croatian (but am equally failing to do!) that I am tempted to register with that just for the sake of additional motivation, although I think it's getting to the stage where I can't honestly call myself a "beginner". In a parallel universe where I have a thing called free time, I actually want to register with Czech in preparation for going to Prague for August bank holiday :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4488 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 160 of 292 01 May 2015 at 2:36am | IP Logged | ||
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You are not a beginner in Croatian, but you can still log your progress.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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