Content DjVu to PDF Conversion for Kindle

[stvs]

Since getting my Kindle, I've discovered the thousands+ of books available in DjVu format, which the Kindle doesn't speak. Back in the day, DjVu had 1-2 orders of magnitude better compression for scanned documents than did PDFs, so it was used for many good books.

I have not seen this nice workflow for converting DjVu's into pdfs, so I'm reproducing it here. It uses Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, and produces pdfs with the same/better compression as the original scanned DjVu book, along with OCR searchable text. Looks fantastic on the Kindle 3.

1. Get djvulibre, djview, and djvu2pdf from sourceforge. On a Mac, this is simple if you have Xcode and Macports installed: just issue the command,

sudo port install djvulibre djview djvu2pdf

2.

djvu2pdf file.djvu ; mv file.djvu.pdf file.pdf

3. Adobe Acrobat Pro: Acrobat>Save As...>Format: Adobe Files, optimized>Settings...>Make compatible with: Acrobat 9.0 and later>Save

4. Document>OCR Text Recognition>Recognize Text Using OCR...>Edit...>PDF Output Style>ClearScan

The optimized pdf is typically a little smaller than the original DjVu document, and OCR adds the benefits of searchable text, as well as rotating scanned pages and cleaning up the images a little.

[montalex]

You can also simply install Duokan, which reads DJVU nicely.

[carld]

There's another method which is free as it doesn't require Acrobat Pro.

Install WinDjview.
Install BullzipPDFPrinter

Open your .djvu file in WinDjview, select Print and you should have a Print to PDF option under printers. There's no OCR, but it should produce a Kindle readable PDF.

[stvs]

It would be great to have a completely free solution that avoids Acrobat, but I've not seen one yet. The pdf's produced by djvu2pdf are ~10X larger than the original DjVu file, and I've only seen Acrobat's optimization able to get them down below the original file size. This is a significant issue for any size library.

Another track that Acrobat will do for the Kindle in this context is to split two-sided book scans into separate left/right pages for easy Kindle reading. The workflow is:

0. djvu2pdf, then save as optimized (as above).
1. Pages view, Right-click->Crop Pages. Crop the left, then the right side of the pages and save in separate pdf files.
2. Use the basic version of pdfsam to merge the alternate left and right pages.
3. Acrobat OCR.

The resulting pdfs are typically the same size as the original DjVu files, but noticeably cleaned up, text searchable, and easy to read on a Kindle.

[_kindle_]

You can also have a look at this if you want to achieve some handsome output files: http://www.djvupdf.com/

[Caleb666]

How good is Duokan's DJVU support?

Does its support TOC and searching (for OCR'd files)?

[valex]

Here is another very nice free converter http://pd4ml.com/djvu.htm

[willus]

Try k2pdfopt for optimizing DJVU for kindle and pdfr for converting to PDF. Both are free.

[eLiNK]

the benefit of using the Adobe CS is the small size of the final pdf file, which you would not probably reach by using other conversion methods.

The final text looks very nice indeed and can hardly be distinguished from the text of an electronic book.

But to get there, the original scan has to be of a rather high quality.

And even then, it is not rare that blanks get added in the middle of words, making the search process in the file not very reliable.

In some cases, letters get smudged.

[osnova]

It's a shame that DjVu has failed to attain more wide-spread acceptance and backing my major players. I really liked the format and it has some nice features that were way ahead of pdf (and still are).

On the topic. I am with Carld. I have WinDjView (the best Win DjVu reader) and from there I either print to pdf or (if I need higher quality and configurability) save to tif.

[willus]

Sumatra PDF reader (Windows only) can also view DJVU (and a few other formats).