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Work :: Kindlize

Kindlize image
Code from the MetaEdit class
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Language:
Java

The Kindle 3’s PDF reading capability is nice, but leaves some things to be desired. One of the more irritating things is that by default, Kindle just lists the PDF filename, instead of listing it by title/author as with other formats. This hack is a quick, lightweight way to take some of the pain out of Kindle PDF reading by allowing you to alter PDFs (pre-Kindle upload) to make them more Kindle-friendly. Specifically, it

  • Renames the PDF file to the full title for a prettier display on the Kindle
  • Sets the PDF InfoKey metadata fields Author and Title

The result is that, once uploaded, your PDF shows up in the familiar title/author Kindle display format. Also, you can now search for PDFs by author rather than just by whatever the text of the PDF filename happened to be.

For example, let’s say I have a copy of Church’s A Formulation of the Simple Theory of Types as a PDF in the file church_simple.pdf. Rather than uploading this file directly and trying to commit the mnemonics of its naming to memory, I run kindlize on it:

$ kindlize church_simple.pdf "A Formulation of the Simple Theory of Types" "Alonzo Church"

where the first argument is the PDF title and the second is the author.

Kindlize is part of a larger PDF metadata editing tool I call MetaEdit. To run or compile it you will need

This software is released under the GPL. As usual, the tar archive below contains full source code and binaries for Kindlize, plus bash scripts for invoking it. I also include an Ant build file for easy modification and redistribution.

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© 2001-2012
Scott Martin.
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