hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3153.txt

Episode: 3153
Title: HPR3153: Fixing eBooks with Calibre and pdfcrop
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3153/hpr3153.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:51:34

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3153 for Wednesday, 2 September 2020. Today's show is entitled,
Fixing eBooks with Calibur and PDFCrop. It is hosted by Ken Farlin,
and is about five minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
Ken uses Calibur to convert AEPUB to PDF, then uses PDFCrop to trim the margins.
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Hi everybody, my name is Ken Farlin. You're listening to another episode of HBR.
Today I'm putting out this show because we're kind of short of shows.
If you have not submitted a show this year, please feel free to do so. If you've not submitted a show at all,
then definitely do so. If you're a regular host and have got shows available,
keep an eye on the queue please, and send them in if we need them. Thank you very much.
I'm doing this series because my son has been reading a series of adventure stories,
which contains a lot of drawings and pictures. We got them in e-book format.
The majority of the books on print format ended up the last few we needed to get on e-book format.
They came in just as text files in the format for this particular e-book reader that we have,
which is a cobalt. We were then able to download it in other formats,
but that had the result of when we put it on to the e-book reader, the drawings, the page.
If you can imagine a page and then you slide your hand in, the main page was split into four.
It just didn't fit into one screen. For every page, there was four screens.
The main screen, then the bit that was left over on the right hand side,
the bit that was left over on the bottom and then a blank page.
Sometimes that had a little bit of information in the top right corner.
That was highly difficult.
I'm annoying to read as well. Sometimes the text would be just completely jumbled over each other
and just a complete mess.
The way I was able to fix this and fix this in inverted commas was to open the books in
an import them into calibration and then press convert books.
Then you get an input format, which is e-pop in this case,
and the output format is PDF. Yes, yes, I know, I know.
Then under default profile, I selected 0000 for all the margins.
Then in PDF options, I selected paper size of A3 format.
When I exported that, what I got was a PDF book where the original was a bigger page
and the entire page is just in there on that bigger page.
Think of it like you put an A4 page on an A3 page or this is probably actually a US letter page on an A3 page.
So it all fitted in. Now I have the problem that if I imported that and put it on the e-reader,
everything will be squashed down because you've got a page surrounded by a huge big border.
Then that is where a Linux comes to the rescue in the form of the command,
which is PDF crop.
So PDF crop, just open the man page, PDF, C or OP.
No manual entry for PDF crop, PDF crop dash HLB.
And what we get is PDF crop, copyright, Henko Oberlich.
And you get some options, margins and calculations removed for each page in this document.
What this does is quickly remove the margins.
The weird thing about it is that you need to use basically, in my case,
I needed to use minus the whole time to crop it in.
So you go PDF crop, dash dash margins.
And this gives you the left, top, right, and bottom margins that you want to crop from.
Weirdly enough, if you put positive numbers in there, it actually adds margins around.
So I use minus four, minus four, minus four, and minus five.
And then I also use the dash dash clip option.
It means the margins are set.
If the margins are set, clipping supports, clip or no clip.
And then I used the PDF name of the original, the three that I exported from Calibre.
And then I'll put that PDF, which is the PDF of the new one that I have.
And that then allowed me to at least trim the margins of the page so that it's just down to the page size as printed.
And that kind of works quite well.
Then of course, you need to just copy it over to re-reader and how well your e-reader displays it is basically how well it can display PDFs.
But at least it's the best option.
It's not frustrating to read anymore.
That's it, tuned in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
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