Has anyone tried creating a PDF of images in Lightroom or other programs and loading that into their Kindle?
If so how did the images look on the screen?
Thanks Mike
I just did this last week, not to photographic images but to both a short story and an unfinished work of mine that's now the length of a novelette (20k words, so far).
The original texts were in ".txt" format, because they were written on my AlphaSmart Neo (which is the subject of an entirely different thread -- a great writing-only tool, one of the best keyboards found anywhere, and a two-year battery life on three AA-cells, available from Renaissance Learning's online store for around $160us).
I imported the ".txt" files into Open Office Writer (but Word or any other full-featured WP would work), then resized the pages to fit the size of the Kindle. I have the latest WiFi-only version of the Kindle ($139US in the colonies), so I simply measured the screen size of the Kindle, used that for the page size in Open Office Writer, then formatted the border size to 0.1". I then exported the file as a PDF (file/export/pdf) and saved it as a PDF file. Make sure, after resizing the document's page size for the Kindle but before exporting as a PDF, to apply whatever margin justification that you want. I like it justified on both right and left margins. After export to PDF, the original WP file I simply reverted back to full-sized pages. Thus, the page resizing was a temporary means to achieve a PDF of the right page size.
Then you attach the Kindle to your computer via the supplied USB cable; the Kindle will show up as a flash drive in your computer's file structure. Open the Kindle folder and drag your newly created PDF files into the Kindle's "Documents" folder. That's all there is to it. Once you disconnect the Kindle and go to the Home screen you'll see your new document in the list of books, and can be opened and read like any other Kindle Store e-book.
The quality looks every bit as good as the Kindle Store's paid files, although I'm not sure of the style of font used in the Kindle (I think it's listed in the master owner's manual document), you should be able to get close to matching the font style in Word or Open Office Writer.
Regarding the quality of B/W images on the Kindle, I am impressed with the pre-loaded images the Kindle applies to the screen when you power it off; they are like half-tone newspaper images but of a much higher resolution. Gray scale is adequate, and the fine grain of the eInk display gives it an interesting texture. Of course, the brighter the viewing light the better, as is the case with all Kindle-like displays, which is one of their chief advantages over backlit displays.
Based on my impression of the graphic images I've seen on the Kindle, I'm curious about exploring the creation of PDF files with B/W images sized and formatted specifically for the Kindle, as a Kindle-specific B/W photography book. This shouldn't be too hard to do. You can import JPEGs into modern word processor programs, then resize the pages and export as a PDF. You can also use programs like Power Point or Open Office Simpress to create pages with JPEG images, then export as PDF documents.
BTW, you can surf the Internet on the Kindle, although the pages are monochrome and nonanimated. But the quality is more than adequate for simply reading text and viewing B/W images.
~Joe
