How to use the Fuze as an Ebook Reader

Hello,

I’ve been quite impressed by the Fuze, but was disappointed I couldn’t use it as an ebook reader. However, after a bit of work, I figured out how to turn it into one.

Note: This guide assumes you have installed openoffice, though any other word processor should work well. Steps 3-5 are only necessary if using a gutenberg project book downloaded as a txt file.

You’ll need one particularly useful (free and open source) program first: ImageMagick . It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Just download the file you need from the site or if you’re running linux just grab the version from your repository.

  1. Load a file into Openoffice
  2. Reformat the size to 8.11x6.49cm (Landscape), no margins, size 16 font (you may want to change this according to your preference).

Optional

3. Replace all line breaks with spaces. Use ‘$’ in search.
4. Replace then put paragraph breaks back in by searching for ’  ’ and replaceing with \n. Regular Expressions should be checked for this to work.
5. Change text to Text Body style so formatted correctly.

  1. Save file then export to PDF.

  2. Use the command on PDF file: ‘convert -resize 220x176 x.pdf x%05d.jpg’ where x.pdf is the pdf file and x.jpg is the desired jpg file. Be sure to do this in the directory where the PDF is located. Note: I’d recommend putting this file in a directory by itself - it’s going to be populated by a lot of images soon.

  3. Copy the files to the Fuze and enjoy reading.


What happens when you run the script step 7? Essentially it converts the PDF files into jpegs, sequentially numbered and perfectly sized for the fuze screen.  The fuze can’t read any ebook format, but it CAN show jpegs just fine. By ordering them sequentially you can flip them the pages by using the forward and back buttons in image mode. It looks and works just like an ebook.

I’d recommend putting each 50 or 100 pages in a separate folder in the fuze so that you can select the folder first, and then just scroll to the right page. For example, if you’ve generated 200 jpegs from the pdf conversion, on the fuze I’d create 4 folders called “P100” “P200” “P300” “P400”. Just put the first 100 in P100, the next 100 in P200, etc. This makes resuming reading far easier if you’re in a book with hundreds of pages.


I hope this has been helpful! All the best!

Thank you!  I’m going to give that a try.  I had found a blog post on how to make flash cards (with an ipod but I fixed it for a fuze).

ETA:

I couldn’t figure out the imagmagik software, so I haven’t tried it yet.  Thanks for the option though.

Message Edited by Dalaug234 on 08-18-2009 02:12 PM

Hi:

I’ve recently put in sourceforge an small application for converting text files to a sorted list of images in a folder, that can be easily copied to the photo or image folders of most multimedia devices. This ables an easy way to read e-books in a sansa fuze, for example. The application runs in console, needs perl, but is somewhat functional at this moment. A:

  perl rendertext.pl -h

…shows all the options.

An example usage could be:

  perl rendertext.pl readme.txt -f -d=samplebook --full

Now allows color, line spacing, letter spacing and font specification, aparts from compression options, margins, word wrapping, page numbers and etc… I’m the only one working on it, so donations (via sourceforge http://rendertext.sourceforge.net or paypal: ignacio_javier_igjav@yahoo.com) are not only welcome, but needed for increase motivation and make it a more “physical” thing.

For each dollar or euro donated, a musical soul is saved from the repetitive “musical limbo”.

Ignatius “Constantine” Xabier, aka Ignacio Javier “igjav” –

lawmartin wrote: 

I think the screen on Fuze is too small for me, anyway.  I download from Project Gutenberg, or scan text, into Adobe Reader, have it read out loud, and record it using an MP3 recorder.  There are some oldies but goodies on Gutenberg. And I listen, don’t have to squint.

I posted this in the wrong place yesterday. I was overtired, but I was overjoyed with the simplicity of it. Hope that helps. :smileyvery-happy: