DejaVu (*.djvu) ebooks, PDF & Kindle

I recently came across a DejaVu file that I wanted to view on my Amazon Kindle 3 . The kindle 3 can't view these ebook files normally, I tried to put the file in the documents folder on my kindle but it wouldn't display and nothing happened. The DejaVu ebook file format is used a lot for scanned documents since it is great for compression and small file sizes.

Best way - using DjVuLibre

If you install the djvulibre-bin (Ubuntu install link) package, you will now have the djvups command, which converts a DejaVu file to PostScript (.ps). You can then use any tool (like ps2pdf) to turn that .ps into a .pdf.

Full command sequence

djvups original_file.djvu temp.ps ps2pdf temp.ps outputfile.pdf rm temp.ps

In my experience using djvups is much faster than using ImageMagick's convert, and uses much, much less memory. The conversion to .ps quick, but the conversion to pdf step can take longer. Once again, the pdf (and ps file) is much larger than the .djvu file (about 100 times the size)

Worse ways

Before I found out about djvulibre-bin, I tried using ImageMagick & print to PDF. It's always more helpful to do an aptitude search XXX first. ☺

Command Line using ImageMagick

You can use ImageMagick's convert programme to convert a djvu file to pdf on the command line and then view that PDF on your Kindle.

convert originalfile.djvu output.pdf

The more pages in the djvu file, the more time and memory it will take to run. The resultant PDF might be quite large.

Using Gnome graphical interface and print to PDF

You can transform a DejaVu file to PDF using the GNOME document viewer. Just open the file as normal from the GUI, and print it to PDF. This will produce the PDF you can put on your kindle. But in my experience, the PDF file is much larger than the djvu file.

Other options

k2pdfopt is another tool. (Haven't tried it yet)