PDF files under calibre

[artimess]

I am new to this forum and I apologize for perhaps a simple question, I would like to have my PDF articles or books organized, cataloged by Calibre. I noticed the converter when converts it, the formatting of the PDF files are being lost. I was wondering how should I go about converting them without losing the formating of them.

Thanks,
Artimess

[desertgrandma]

Welcome to MobileRead, artimess.

Someone should be along shortly to answer your question.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

If all you are doing is storing and cataloging your PDFs, why and what are you converting to? Are you viewing them in calibre's viewer or letting another reader open them? I use calibre to catalog PDFs and view them in Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard and have not had that problem.

[SkyDream]

To catalag and read PDF files using calibre you don't have o convert them. Just add the PDF files and open them. This should bring up your PDF reader (adobe, foxit whatever).

[theducks]

To expand on Lady F
there is an Preferences option to control when Calibres default viewer is used (or let your system handle it).

Open Preferences
Select Interface.
Select Behavior. change the ticks in the right column to your desires
(If you have a external reader, you might want to adjust the preferred output format)

Apply

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by theducks

To expand on Lady F
there is an Preferences option to control when Calibres default viewer is used (or let your system handle it).

Open Preferences
Select Interface.
Select Behavior. change the ticks in the right column to your desires
(If you have a external reader, you might want to adjust the preferred output format)

Apply

To keep expanding (as I unfortunally do as I age), the reader in calibre takes a ridiculously long time to open large PDFs (15 MB or so; I've never opened one that large because I get too impatient). Adobe Reader, Foxit, etc. work much better. If you use calibre's default settings, PDFs are not included in the formats to open in calibre's viewer. If you changed them, you can always follow theducks' directions to reset them. To open a book in calibre, you can click on the book, then click on View, or you can doubleclick on the book's line number to the left of the book's entry in calibre's main screen (I always use the latter). It will then open in either calibre's viewer or the viewer associated with the filetype of the book, depending on the settings in Preferences.

[itimpi]

As I understand it, if you try and use the Calibre viewer for PDF files they are first internally converted to ePub which will be why they take a long time to come up. That begs the question - why would you ever want to use the Calibre viewer with PDF when as has already been noted a dedicated PDF viewer does a much better job.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by itimpi

As I understand it, if you try and use the Calibre viewer for PDF files they are first internally converted to ePub which will be why they take a long time to come up. That begs the question - why would you ever want to use the Calibre viewer with PDF when as has already been noted a dedicated PDF viewer does a much better job.

I had to try it just to see how my image only PDFs would compare to viewing on Adobe Acrobat. I quit trying after two or three attempts because I have better things to do than dying of old age waiting on it. Adobe works well enough.