KMFstudio

I’ve recently got my hands on a new Ebook-reader (the Sony Reader) which uses the Eink-technology. Electronic paper if you will. With this technology, an image is built up electronically onscreen. But after the initial image-creation, the screen won’t use any (electronic) power anymore. Because it doesn’t have a backlightit reads just like a real paper (newspaper quality)
Besides power consumption, the resolution, or better said, DPI is very good too. 166, this can be compared to a printout from a inkjet printer.

IMO, this technology would be mature in a few years, therefor I wanted to see the potential and become an early adapter to see how it could benefit our further development.

(i’ll write a review in later posts)

For this gadget, I’ve made a C#-program which would convert a collection of digitized comics and manga into a PDF-file which eventually can be used on an electronic reader device.

Because it’s written in C# you’d need to install .NET 2.0 (if you haven’t already.)

Also, it need the image manupilation power of the free and powerfull ImageMagick. Download and install the files here (or get the package which has the files included). Chose for the ones named -Q16-windows-dll.exe

This program can be found here:

base program

program with imagemagick-DLL included

A quick and dirty explanation on the usage:

Goal
Manga2Ebook is created to autoconvert vast manga/comics -collection(s) to a PDF-file(s) with the intention to for reprocessing through a PDF to readerformat tool.
Wether your Ebook-reader can read the PDF-files depends on the reader.
If you are using the Sony Reader or Irex Ilyad, I’d recommend you to run the PDF-files through the free program RasterFarian. This will rasterize the PDF-files and makes it them suitable for your device (and the size would decrease too)

Usage
Select the main directory with the archives you want to combine into a PDF. Manga2Ebook can handle zip, cbz, rar and cbr-files.
Manga2Ebook will create a subdirectory named “destination” for it’s files (if it doesn’t exist yet). The size of this directory will be at least 2 times as big as the source directory, so make sure you have enough diskspace.

Step 1 Re-archiving
The title of the archive(s) will be used to determine the sorting as they will eventually be the “chapter”-title in the PDF-file, so if you haven’t done so yet, I’d recommend you to sort and rename your archives with good naming. (rasterfarian can convert these into a TOC too)
Manga2Ebook will try to recursive unpack the archives, but only the main archive will be the chaptertitle. (example: Manga.zip contains chapter1.zip, chapter2.zip. Manga2Ebook will make the chaptername “Manga”. The files found in the other archives will merely be pages)
Within the selected directory, a temporary process-directory will be made where the files are unpacked, sorted into folders (so if you have a chapter1.zip and a ch2.zip in Manga.zip, the ch2 files will go before chapter1 files. You’re responsible for sorting your own collection).

Step 2 Image processing
After unarchiving the images will be processed in correspondence to the settings. These will be placed underneath a “destination/resized”-folder.

Step 3 PDF creation
The final step is the PDF-creation. From the images and folderstructure in the resized folder, a PDF will be created. This will be placed in the destination folder.
The “document”-titlevalue will determine the file’s name.

Final steps. Run the PDF files through your favorite converter for your ebook-reader if needed

notes: I’ve managed to create LRS and LRF-files too, but this option has been removed, because the LRF-files rasterized by rasterfarian are smaller.