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Briss Trims and Repaginates PDFs for Better E-Reading

by Terrence O'Brien on October 10, 2010 at 09:01 AM

BrissPDFs viewing on an e-reader is a must-have feature. But there is a problem; many PDFs you'll find, whether passed out by professors or downloaded from free e-book sites like Project Gutenberg or Google Books, are poorly formatted for reading on the devices. There are often errant page headers and page numbers that end up in seemingly random spots of the text. You might occasionally encounter documents that have a two-column layout, which is not particularly e-reader friendly.

Briss is a cross-platform Java app that allows you to crop, trim, and repaginate PDF documents for cleaner reading on a portable device. The UI should seem friendly enough to anyone who has ever cropped a photo. Briss looks for repetitive structures, and identifies existing pages. It then asks you to select (using a free-hand rectangle tool) the parts of the document to keep. You can even choose different parts for even and odd pages, or split two pages that are in a single image (the result of placing a book face down on a scanner). This will help make legible images out of those that would otherwise be impossible to read on smaller screens like those of the Kindle, Nook, and Sony Pocket Reader.

Calibre, which we've previously covered here, is essential for getting PDFs on your device, and for converting PDFs that have had OCR (optical character recognition) performed on them to the friendlier ePub format. But, for PDFs that are simply image scans of documents (which your writer encounters constantly in grad school), Briss is an absolute lifesaver.

Tags: apps, briss, downloads, e-books, e-readers, ereaders, linux, mac, pc, top

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