# How to... make PDF's that fit in the kindle's screen?



## jjpbm (Feb 2, 2012)

Hi everyone!
I got my first Kindle a few days ago and I have a small issue: my teachers often send their classes on PDF, which are slides originally made on Powerpoint and then converted to PDF. When I try to read them on Kindle the slide is slightly bigger for the Kindle's screen and the down part of is often cut. So, I need to click 2 times to change the slide: one for the up part and two for the rest of it. Is there a way to make those PDF slides smaller so they can fit in the Kindle screen?
Thanks for your sugestions and sorry for my terrible English (I'm from Portugal, by the way)
See you soon,

J.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

The person that makes the PDF has to set the size in Acrobat (the full program, not the Reader). They would have to set it up so that the type size was adequate, and the page size was around 8cm by 11 cm. It would take some experimentation to get a good type size.

If they are using heavily formatted pages, i.e. lots of lists and bullet items, it would be a lot of work for them to do this, as they might have to break it up into several Kindle pages for every page on a computer screen.

Alternately, you could try one of the programs that converts PDF to a flowable format that the Kindle can use. You can send it to Amazon via email and they will convert it and send it back to your Kindle. The results might not be so good, though. I think details on how to do this are in the User Guide that came with your Kindle. I haven't had occasion to do this, so don't have the details handy.

Mike


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

Agree with all Mike's suggestions. The only other thought I can add is that you may find that if you rotate the PDF sideways (from the Aa key) and turn the Kindle on its side, the fit might be better - probably still two screens per page but maybe easier to view.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

In important thing to note about PDF format that has been hinted at but not really been clearly stated:

PDF is an OUTPUT format! It's meant to be the final product. It was developed so that documents could be formatted to a standard and multiple people could look at the same thing and know they were, literally, on the same page.

So. . . . .MOST PDF's are designed to display best on a standard letter sheet. Which is larger than the size of a kindle screen. So a PDF like that is never going to display well on a Kindle or even a Fire. It's the nature of the beast.

However, as Mike suggests, if, instead, the original document is designed to fit on a page the size of a Kindle screen, it might work just fine. OR, if the font used is significantly larger so that when shrunk down from a 'letter' page to a 'kindle' page the type is still large enough to read comfortably.

Really, though, the answer is that, though Kindle lists PDF as a compatible format, it is absolutely NOT ideal. If that's PRIMARILY what a person plans to use it for, I'd say don't get a Kindle at all -- or get a DX sized kindle as the screen is bigger and the PDF will not be shrunk as much.

Now, some will say you can do conversions. Again, PDF is an OUTPUT format -- it's not meant to be un-made. So the results will be problematic. Probably satisfactory if it's only print, but if there are _any_ unique layout issues -- charts, columns, embedded images -- the thing won't convert well.


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## JimC1946 (Aug 6, 2009)

jmiked said:


> You can send it to Amazon via email and they will convert it and send it back to your Kindle. The results might not be so good, though. I think details on how to do this are in the User Guide that came with your Kindle. I haven't had occasion to do this, so don't have the details handy.


The Amazon file conversion usually works well for me, and you get the file back (a link, actually) in a couple of minutes. Here are Amazon's instructions:

_If you prefer to have your personal PDF documents converted to the Kindle format so you can take advantage of Kindle functionality such as variable font size, annotation, Text-to-Speech, Whispersync, etc., type "convert" in the subject of the e-mail when you submit your personal document to your Send-to-Kindle e-mail address._


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