Special bonus tip for HN readers! To get a set of good starting values for cropping the margins, use the existing pdfcrop utility with the --verbose flag.<p>It will display the existing BoundingBox property as it processes each page. Let it run for a few pages, kill it, and use those numbers as a starting point. They will probably not be as tight as you'd like, since they won't cut out page numbers or headers.
For someone that has a Kindle/KindleDX/Nook: How good is the Kindle/Kindle DX for technical books? I want to buy one (since I am immigrating and will lose all my textbooks).<p>Is it good for technical books - since the page turn speed is apparently very slow? Will the iPad be better for this?
Pretty much the only thing that's making me consider switching from my Sony PRS-505 (it's the one pictured in the blog post) to a Kindle DX is the ability to read PDFs without the annoying and buggy reflowing. Cutting pages doesn't do the trick for me though.. I probably *will& get the DX :(
For technical papers in two-column format, I've thought of just chopping each page into four. (Brute force, judiciously applied. ;-)<p>If you feel like testing that, I'd appreciate to hear about it.
Sigh. Well, no joy on the mac, despite the presumed promise of platform-neutral Python.<p>Python 2.5.1:<p>line 8: !DOCTYPE: No such file or directory<p>line 9: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'<p>line 9: ` "<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd>" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd></a>;<p>Python 3.0:<p><pre><code> File "pdfmunge.py", line 8
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
^
</code></pre>
SyntaxError: invalid syntax