[OS X TeX] Configuring LaTeX produced PDF's for a Kindle

[William Adams]

On Jan 3, 2011, at 11:23 PM, David Derbes wrote:

> My guess is that there is a sensible solution out there somewhere, using the geometry package or something. Does anyone have an appropriate preamble incantation that will output what would have been standard US pages into a nice Kindle format? I don't mind flipping pages 4x as often, but having to scroll first left and then right, or reading tiny tiny fonts, is just unacceptable. I think someone has invented this wheel already, but there's nothing obvious on the web as yet.

As David and Peter noted, one simply needs the proper size (well, actually proportion, since the .pdfs will scale) and appropriately sized text for the line width.

The design I worked up for Mike Brotherton's _StarDragon_ works pretty well (if w/ overly generous margins, see usenet:comp.text.tex).

Kevin Klement has done a lot of work in this space and has a source code archive up at:

http://people.umass.edu/klement/russell-imp.html

There's been some discussion of this at www.mobileread.com including this page of tests:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=107585&highlight=latex

As the last post notes, if you can, converting to a Kindle Book (or ePub for other platforms) (using latex2html or a similar tool to import into the authoring program Amazon provides) is probably a better option.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.