pdf missing letters

[gabaldini]

Hi, I have a kindle voyage 3g, when reading pdfs , mostly downloaded in the "internet archive" , it miss a few letters at random in every page,it happens in all pdfs, this is not a problem of the pdf. I had a paperwhite and this didnt happened.
Somebody has the same problem or is a defect of my kindle?
thank you

[tomsem]

First, 'internet archive' PDFs likely are not consistent in conforming to PDF standards. They have probably been generated with a variety of workflows and tools (and perhaps none of them commercial tools, since they have limited funding).

Where there are deviations from spec, PDF renderers don't really have any good options, as there are an infinite number of ways to deviate from spec.

So you may find (as I have in the past) that a PDF generated by OS X cannot be rendered in the then-current version of Adobe Reader, and things like that. You can point fingers, but such inter-operability issues come down to different interpretations of a given PDF spec, or some lack of any quality review as revisions are made.

The analogous issue has lingered for years in browser rendering and even today browsers are expected to handle mal-formed HTML.

Quite possibly your Paperwhite has a different (older) version of the PDF renderer than the Voyage. In improving the software, Amazon may have given precedence to performance (speed, memory usage) and security over handling all sorts of non-conforming PDF code. That would be what I'd expect them to do, and want them to do.

So you have all of these PDF files, and you want to read them on Voyage. I would investigate 'PDF cleaner' or 'analyzer' tools. When targeting small screens and low-power devices like Voyage, it can also help to do some cropping or file size reduction. I don't have any particular recommendations for doing this, but perhaps others will contribute some suggestions here.

[gabaldini]

thanks a lot for your answer!
Now I know its not my kindle fault! I would try your suggestions.

[byzkarl]

I have this problem as well. The solution was to install a pdf printer utility (pdfcreator, I think) and print the pdf to the pdf creator.

[razeghi]

I opened the PDF in my Acrobat reader and then used the "send to kindle" option in the "print" dialogue where you have to specify your printer. The file got larger in size but the problem was solved!!
Hope it works for you too!

[dwig]

Originally Posted by gabaldini

thanks a lot for your answer!
Now I know its not my kindle fault! I would try your suggestions.

Actually, it might be your Kindle's fault, though given the horrid PDFs that the Internet Archive distributes I'd say the odds were that the fault lies in the file.

That said, the Renderer vs PDF file coin has two sides. Tomsem describes one side well. On the flip side, though, there are a wide range of perfectly legitimate options in the construction of a PDF. Few PDF renderers support 100% of these. My old Kindle Keyboard doesn't support layer transparency in PDFs, something the IA is notorious for using in their PDFs. This can cause significant "missing" elements when displayed. For ages, Apple's Preview app, their default viewer for PDFs as well as images, failed to support a significant range of legitimate font encoding options making many PDFs generated on Windows fail to render readable text when viewed in Preview although Adobe Reader on Mac displayed the PDF perfectly. The list of such flaws in renderers is endless.