Let me qualify my question, before the guffaws, begin.
While I have used computers since the late '80's I have never used portable apps or burned video files to cd or DVD. It is evident even to me the value they now express in our mobile lives.
I have an aging, partially blind mother and other friends that can only read with the aid of projectors/enlargers of books. They all have a love of reading and it is heart rending to see their loss.
The question: Is there a means of burning an image file or using a portable PDF reader that can be burned to a CD and read within a television CD player? My thought is of scanning the page to a larger font size, burning the image or the PDF file, and putting it into the television CD player, to be viewed on the TV screen.
Okay, you can laugh now...but any insights into the use of portable apps for this purpose would be very welcome. Thank you.
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I've been using PortableApps since August last year when PortableApps appeared on my monthly edition of Australian PC User on their cover DVD and I love it! I am partially blind myself and have always wondered whether people with blindness would be able to use PortableApps, whether they're totally blind, partially blind (I can only see out of my right eye, but only by a small percentage) or any other kind of blindness.
I wish I knew the answer to your question, but I unfortunately don't. Oh, I'm not going to laugh because as I said above, I've got a blindness problem myself and know several people who are totally blind or partially blind, so I don't consider it funny at all, I take it very seriously.
Bradley Eaton
(eltonbrad)
I guess that what you call a television CD player is a DVD player. I know of no DVD players that can read PDF, so if you are not connecting a PC directly to your TV, the only way of doing this I can think of is creating images (jpegs) of pages, or parts of pages, and burning those jpegs on a CD/DVD (most DVD players do read jpegs).
That leaves us with the problem of creating jpegs from pdf. You could use a PDF reader (such as Sumatra PDF Portable) and manually create each jpeg using a utility for creating screenshots (e. g. Lightscreen Portable - this app is pre-release now). You end up with a bunch of jpegs, burn them to a CD (can also be done with a PortableApp: InfraRecorder Portable) and insert into the DVD player. This process is time-consuming, but is the only way I can think of if you use portable apps.
You could produce jpegs from pdfs automatically, using Ghostscript and Ghostview, but portable versions of these apps are listed as "Outdated Beta Tests" (see here, somewhere below the middle of the page) and some problems have been reported. Of course, you can install "regular" versions of Ghostscript and Ghostview on your computer.
I must also add that this method (Ghoscript/Ghostview) of producing jpegs from pdfs can create one jpeg per page, which can be unsuitable for viewing on TV (at least without zooming), so one would probably want to cut this image into several smaller images.
If you are interested in Ghostscript/Ghostview option, I can give you some further advice.
No typin th las lette ca sav yo plent o spac
Okay, just had to put it in there. Maybe you can also see about burning stuff as a VCD, video CD, which you may be meaning about, not just DVD's with images. Many dvd players do read VCD's. Essentially just a scroll of images in order.
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.