Notices

Hello, this is my first post and I do not yet own an 800 but if I solve this problem I will probably go out and get one. I am planning to do a long trip to several continents later this year, and this device seems to be perfect for the traveler. I feel confident that I could book plane tickets, access brokerage accounts, run IP telephone to keep in touch with friends/relatives, do casual e-book reading, language dictionary, currency converter, expense tracker, emails, casual gaming, casual multimedia viewing/listening, pull down RSS feeds to be read later off-line, GPS, etc.

Upon researching my trip, the problem that I have is that just the guidebooks for the countries that I will be visiting weigh over 4 kilograms. I travel light, with everything in one backpack, and so carrying this much weight is simply not an option. You cannot really purchase these books on the road in these non-English speaking countries. Unfortunately, there are really no good e-book options for travel guides, either. I found one company that sold encrypted adobe PDFs of outdated guides which would not work on the 800 or even be practical if it was supported because PDF is such a poor PDA/tablet format.

So what I thought about is scanning in the guidebook pages as jpegs and then using the 880 as a reader. I could organize the scans from each book into a directory and then each book chapter into a subdirectory (I am willing to put some time into this!). What I have noticed, too, is that a lot of these books are two columns to a page, each column about 6 centimeters wide, so no horizontal scrolling would be required on each line while reading, although vertical scrolling would be required as one read down the page and probably both horizontal and vertical scrolling for maps.

I could also do an OCR on the scanned files and turn them into HTML for the book reader. I am assuming this is a very imperfect process, though, and would not work for maps and illustrations (although I would still like to do it).

Does reading jpegs as I have described sound practical from the Nokia 800 perspective? What app would you use to view the jpegs and would the scrolling be very fast? I though perhaps creating HTML that organizes by chapter and page would be the way to go and then use Opera or FBreader.

And if you have any better solutions I am all ears ;-) Thanks very much.

Travis

If you can print them, then you should be able to install a pdf printer driver to your os and print it out as a non-encrypted pdf. You might also have a look at pdf ripping software. They also usually support converting the pdf to html, which might be ideal for you. I think that at some point I saw some programs that basically used adobe pdf reader to open pdf file, then used automation script to

take a screenshot of the pdf area on the screen
save it as png (or whatever)
move the mouse to the next page button
press the button
Then the system repeats that automatically until book is saved as a series of image files. After that, it's simple to use OCR to process the pages and get a pdf as a result (or html).

Thanks, kontorri. I may have a combination of images grabbed from pdfs and freshly scanned images from book pages. This would be thousands of images altogether, well organized in directories and catalogued with HTML.

Which N800 application would be best for viewing an entire book's worth of scanned images, one page at a time? Is image rotation possible (and easy) within the app(s)? Is performance an issue?

OK, maybe it is time for me to go off and buy it ;-)

Thanks,
Travis

Scanning all the pages from four pounds of guidebooks is going to be a pretty big job in itself. Adding the task of OCRing the text and putting it into HTML is a big addition on top of that. You may not have any time left before your trip to read those guidebooks!

The copier at my office is connected to the network and when it's operated as a scanner instead of a copier, the user has the option of receiving the scan as a PDF. On that copier, I choose 600dpi resolution scans and the text is really smooth onscreen or printed out. 300dpi is more than readable and good printing too.

You may find scan-to-PDF a useful compromise between preparing the information for the easiest access while traveling and actually spending the time preparing for your travels. Just don't put too many pages in your PDFs to keep from bogging down the PDF reader.

Roger Sperberg

Thanks, Roger. For sure, it is a big job to scan these things, I figure about a day per guidebook to go from paper book to fully readable format on the N800. But this will be something like an 8 month trip, and mostly I would scan the books for the last 2/3 of the trip (and it is actually over 8 pounds [4 kg] of books!) and carry the books for the countries on the first 1/3 of my trip. Also, on a long trip, there is a lot of downtime while you are resting/in-transit and so I use that time to read the guide for my next country, next city, etc.

I think it comes down to which application works best on N800, pdf reader or FBreader (for jpeg images embedded in HTML) or Opera. I have heard so many bad things about PDF performance and using HTML to reference page images seems more straightforward to me (but I probably couldn't rotate images). Combined with an OCR scan that I could use with FBReader for most of my reading sans maps and images.

I may try posting on the mobileread forum for best way to scan in the books. They seem to have thought a lot about this problem but first I want to read up on posts there.

I will be sure to post about any major progress I have made in the future. I really think that this could be a great long term traveler's device. Until I found out about this device a couple of weeks ago, I had not been able to find anything that might meet my needs.

Thanks,
Travis