[Analogus]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Rizla:

It's very possible that EPUB 3 and Kindle Format 8 will eliminate the necessity of UpSpin's task.

I cannot see why the necessity will be vanish. There will be enough PDF's being outside, and they still want to be read.

Regarding PDF and handling:

I for my part use PDF very often on my 5"-reader. Therefor I developed ;-) following 'decision-tree':

1) Try to use the file without altering it on the reader in re-flow-mode
2) If experience is OK --> read on. If experience is bad try
a) cropping headers and footers as described above
or
b) convert the PDF into EPUB --> goto (3)
3) Converting PDF:

Fact: I do not want to experiment with every PDF to see what happens.
Fact: I sometimes want to have pictures and other times just plain text.
Fact: PDF's come in different quality

My solution for ALL PDF's:

I use the (sadly not free of charge) software ABBY-PDF-Transformer .
It takes EVERY technical form of PDF and do a complete OCR-process. Sometimes it is necessary to do a ~30 min. manual correction of picture-frames.

Details:

1. Crop headers and footers (page numbers, ...) with whatever software you want (for ex. Adobe Acrobat)
2. Load it in Abby-PDF-Transformer and do just a recognition of the different areas (pictures, test, tables)
3. manually correct areas if necessary, especially picture areas. This step is ev. necessary for 50% of PDF's
4. Do the OCR and produce a HTML-file without original layout
5. Open it in MS Word and save it as RTF. Close Word and reopen the RTF. Save it a second time as HTML.
6. Load the HTML-file in CALIBRE
7. Convert it into EPUB

That procedure sounds ridiculous, but there is just (and maybe) one longer part: Correction of areas in Abby-software.

I did a huge number of PDF-converting in various ways and ended up as described.

A.