PET: PDF to Ebook Transmogrifier

Finding a good project name is hard, but I'm pretty confident I've done it.

I've got a project, and it's name is the PDF Ebook Transmogrifier (P.E.T.).

My web browser offered to correct the spelling of Transmogrifier to ''Transmogrified" or "Transmogrifier", which makes me smile.

P.E.T. will convert all those PDFs I want to read into ebooks, so I can read them on my Kindle. You can read them on whatever ebook reader you like, from a smartphone to a picture frame.

I haven't decided what to build P.E.T. out of yet, but for the prototype I'll stick with what I know: Bash, ImageMagick, Octave and Calibre. If those names aren't familiar to you, don't fret; Just know that my first P.E.T. will be cobbled together from spaghetti and sparkles, like all good prototypes. Later I might rewrite it with ITK, because I think it's neat and I want to learn more about it before I try writing another medical image analyzer.

P.E.T. will accept as inputs PDFs with:

• Multiple columns of text and pictures
• Pictures as wide as a column, and as wide as multiple columns
• Headers and footers and page numbers
• Conversion Rules tailored to specific types of documents, and the can-do-attitude to decide when to use them.

If I'm lucky, maybe one day P.E.T. will go off to work with Calibre. That'd make me proud.