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.
- Load a file into Openoffice
- 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.
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Save file then export to PDF.
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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.
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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!