Eric Cosky

I recently felt the urge to view some PDF documents on my Playstation Portable. If you've wanted to read PDFs on a PSP, you already know there is no built in support for this. If the PDF is converted to a series of PNG files (they are more clear/smaller than JPG for this), the PSP's photo viewer can be used to read the converted PDF. It's not perfect, but it is a functional way to accomplish this.

For the technically inclined, this article describes a way to do this conversion using free software resulting in readable images on the PSP.

You will need the following:

• Ghostscript - To convert a PDF into a collection of PNG files, once for each page. We'll be using the command line for this. I used the GPL version, but I dont think it really matters which you use.

Optionally, if you want to crop images to optimize them and make them a little easier to read by removing empty border space:

• FastStone Photo Resizer - A freeware utility that can do a variety of useful things to batches of images.
• GIMP or any image editor that lets you look at PNG and measure pixels. Note: GIMP can certainly work for a cropping tool, but I happen to like the FS Photo Resizer. It's very user friendly.

Part 1: Creating a folder of PNG image files where each image is a page from the PDF

• Create a folder c:\psp
• Create a batch file "pdf2png.bat" in c:\psp and enter the following text into it:

mkdir c:\PSP\%1

"c:\program files\gs\gs8.53\bin\gswin32c" -dSAFER -DBATCH -dNOPAUSE -r200 -sDEVICE=png16m -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile="c:\PSP\%1\%1.%%04d.png" -c save pop -f %1.pdf

Note that you will need to change the path part of the command (c:\program files\gs\gs8.53\bin\gswin32c) to correspond to your particular install of ghostscript. Also, if you need to use a password to read the PDF document, add -sPDFPassword=yourpassword in there, for example, as the first parameter.

• Copy the PDF file to C:\PSP. LEAVE YOUR ORIGINAL PDF SOMEWHERE ELSE. Just in case.
• Start a command console (windows-key-R, cmd) and "cd c:\psp" to change directory to the c:\PSP folder.
• type "pdf2png PDFFilenameWithoutTheDotPDF" without the quotes and press enter. Note that you do not add the .pdf part; it needs the base filename to make the sub folder and for naming the individual images. The batch file will now create a subfolder named after the PDF and populate it with individual images
• Once it's done, you can simply copy the new folder over to your PSP's photo folder. For me, this is G:\PSP\Photos\PDFFolderName. However, if you want them to be a little more easy to read, you will probably want to crop the images so the empty border around the text is removed. Makes for smaller files, and slightly faster page reads. It takes a few minutes, but it's worth it to me because I spend far more time reading than prepping this now that I have a system worked out.

Note: the "-r200" is the DPI for the conversion to images. -r200 gives me images that are 1600 wide. You can use other values, say -r90, for coarser images or -300 for finer images. What is acceptable is going to be a personal preference, just try it out with a single image and decide for yourself

Part 2: Cropping the images so they have less border space

• Open explorer to the folder of images, select thumbnail view.
• Find an image that completely fills the page with text.
• Open the image in your image editor and determine the top left corner in pixels, and the width and height of the useful part of the page.
• Load up FSPhotoResizer.
• Select output format PNG. Click settings button next to the output format, select 256 colors, max compression, paeth filter.
• Select Advanced Options, go to Crop tab, check Use Crop, and enter your coordinates you noted earlier.
• Select a single image, and hit Add.
• Start the conversion for this image.
• Once it's done, manually copy it over to your PSP photo folder. Review it on the PSP, and if it looks good, go back to photo resizer and select all images and process them all. The reason for this check is because you may find your crop settings didn't quite work for you, or perhaps your -r option from part 1 was too coarse.

That's about it. Enjoy.

Useful link: How to use ghostscript