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PDF-rasterizers for the sony reader, a review on rasterfarian, pdfread and pdflrf

peter 5 September 2007 Gadgets 1,337 views One Comment  Print This Post

At the moment of writing there are a few rasterizing-tools available to create LRF files from PDF. I’ve made a comparison of these three products.

The chose settings:

Rasterfarian: settings as described here

PDFread: no cropping, dilation 300, edge level: 5, optimize PNGs

pdflrf: simply nosplitpage, nosmartcut, no cropping, rotation=0.

Converting a file with pdfread creates the smallest lrf, namely 266KB. However, the image quality is very bad. The lines aren’t smooth, and the text in the bubbles are hard to read.

pdflrf is better. The images are clear and readable, but lacks contrast. The size of the resulting LRF is 604KB though. Chosing 4 colors produces smaller size (285KB) but it produces less sharp and more washed out images compared to rasterfarian.

The same PDF-file converted with Rasterfarian result in a 300KB-lrf and the image quality as loaded in the reader has the highest contrast as well as clearity. Text are smooth and many details remains.

So… it’s obvious for me, Rasterfarian is a true winner for the creation of imagebased-lrffiles. Not only does it create the best quality images, it’s filesize is great too.

However, PDFread and PDFLRF both have a nice windows userinterface. Rasterfarian might be somewhat more complicated to use.

The pdf-files and the resulting LRF-files are attached to this article

Original PDF-file for rasterization

PDFlrf converted manga

PDFlrf converted manga 4 colors

PDFread converted manga

Manga converted with rasterfaran

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