
日本語のエントリーはこちら
As my friends know, recently, I'm getting absorbed in creating eBook myself using ScanSnap and a cutting machine. Actually ScanSnap and a cutting machine combination are awesome. I can easily get a great PDF from a real book in ten minutes. (It's also included a text data using OCR at the same time.)

Then, I'm finding a best reader device. Actually, I had tried to use Sony eBook reader which can directly read a PDF through USB file transfer. But, when I directly copy the PDF to the device, I found two critical problems.
One is a performance. Original PDF is slightly large for the device. The device have to downscale to show each pages. It's sometime taking a few seconds to forward a page.
Second is a quality. Even the downscale is done. The rendering result is not sufficient to read it sometimes.




I had some trials then I finally found a way to create optimized PDF for eBook reader. These pictures are comparing with original and optimized PDF. I think you can easily to find optimized PDF. (sure bottom one is optimized.)
At this time, I created one script to optimize the PDF for these devices as well. The script is written by Automator. I just confirm the behavior with Snow Leopard. (Also this is totally first time, I feel Automator is useful :-P)
Please to download ebooktize from here.

You can double click it. Automator is started with this script. When you click Run button where is located at top right of the window. You can select the PDF file which you want to optimize. After the processing is done, you will get optimized PDF Converted.pdf as name at your Desktop.
I also explained what the script do here.
- select a PDF file
- get TIFF images from each page from pdf.
- crop 10% margin from each pages
- resize each pages to 750 pixel (longer side)
- create new PDF from the processing pages
- convert to grayscale
- increase a contrast
- output Converted.pdf to Desktop
About iPhone, this optimized PDF is very useful. I recommended to read it with Good Reader on iPhone as well.