Most accurate method to convert PDF -> ePub

[MarjaE]

Yes. In my experience the biggest problems are:

1. Either omitting important graphic tables, or retaining unimportant page frames, page backgrounds, and other cruft.

2. Mis-ocring numbers. Since it's especially hard to spot that these are off, and they throw resulting figures off.

3. Screwing up text tables.

4. Columns, column, columns.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I wanted to add an interesting experience here, that I just dealt with, yesterday.
. . .
…but...on a flyer, I ran it through OCR, in Acrobat Pro. Then, I exported the new PDF, which now had a text layer, to Word.

And I'll be dammed, but the resulting file is NOT horrible. I mean, with a modicum of cleanup--not beyond the regular person--it could be entirely usable. I was pretty gobsmacked because the source PDF was not wonderful. It wasn't the worst I've ever seen (a scanned copy of a multiply-faxed document--that was the worst), but it wasn't crisp, either, and the pages were not wildly straight. But it worked, and the resulting Word file was not bad at all.

Hitch knows this, but I'll say it here in case others missed it on other threads.

To convert a PDF to something editable the first tool I try is Word itself (2016 or later), it can't handle very large PDFs, but the results can be as good or better than the FineReader scanning etc route. I've wondered if MS and Adobe use a common code base for the PDF related improvements they've made to Acrobat and Word. There was speculation a few months ago that MS would acquire Adobe.

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Hitch knows this, but I'll say it here in case others missed it on other threads.

To convert a PDF to something editable the first tool I try is Word itself (2016 or later), it can't handle very large PDFs, but the results can be as good or better than the FineReader scanning etc route. I've wondered if MS and Adobe use a common code base for the PDF related improvements they've made to Acrobat and Word. There was speculation a few months ago that MS would acquire Adobe.

BR

Well, that acquisition would be fascinating.

Hitch

[democrite]

If I need OCR, I'll generally use FineReader.

Acrobat seems to be in many cases, of what I've tried so far best overall at exporting commercial vector PDFs. Unfortunately there aren't many options. Sometimes HTML export is better than Word, easier to correct, though the HTML isn't great. It can style paragraphs as italic, with a span for normal, a bit of work to correct. Or it can create lists, such as currently, a line break that might start with "1." or some initial on the next line, same paragraph, it'll break and create a list; a lot of work to correct.

Maybe I will again try Nitro, Phantom and whatever other PDF reader I can find. Word might be an option but it's a large PDF I'd have to split. Afraid of multiple CSS style definitions with the same name but different definition per split that would cause other pains to fix.

[JSWolf]

Once you've converted the PDF to anything else, you'll need to A/B compare the PDF to the output format. That means every letter, every space, every punctuation, etc. Because if you don't, you WILL have errors.