2 column PDF book to 1 column possible?

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by willus

I'll look into it... Are you running 32-bit or 64-bit (what does uname -a say when you type it into the terminal shell?)

10.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0: Tue Jun 7 16:32:41 PDT 2011; root:xnu-1504.15.3~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

[willus]

Originally Posted by unboggling

sorry, willus, can't get it to run. doesn't behave like executable on my system, which is snow leopard OS X 10.8.6. Doesn't run in terminal. Appears as web archive htm, doesn't seem compiled.

Try downloading the OSX version again following my latest install notes:

http://willus.com/archive/k2pdfopt/k...help.shtml#mac

[franklinreid]

Originally Posted by SeaBookGuy

I can read it on okay my Sony 650, in 4-quadrant view with zooming, but that's kind of a pain. Any way to convert such docs to single column, so that I can switch to a larger font (currently, that causes a mess jumbling the column contents)?

Most of us are looking for a quick-fix. A click-the-button instant conversion from a two-column document to one. Then we can save it in another format, say Word. No known software can do this.

I have done it many times but in a different way. It requires a lot of work but if you are willing, it can be done.

I'm a mechanical engineer turned technical writer who converts a customer's User Guides or Maintenance Manuals from a pdf file into a workable doc file. What software do I use? My tool of choice is AABBY, the worldwide high quality standard for this -- but it's expensive, to. There is another way that is cheaper and, well, actually it's free.

You will need a pdf reader program, I use both Foxit and Adobe readers. Once the page is on the screen you then capture the text in one column and save it to the clipboard or just do a Ctrl-C to copy it. Then paste it into a Notepad file. Notepad is, well notable, for stripping out all formatting and just giving raw ASCII text. Copy this into your word processor.

That was easy, but now comes the work. You will quickly see that the file is in separate paragraphs per line which have to be combined into regular paragraphs. I'll leave that to you to learn it for your word processor. Yes, there is still a lot of work ahead but it IS IN ONE COLUMN!

I hope this helps.
Franklin

[KayLee]

After I converted my PDF to Docx and converted that to Epub in Calibre, Calibre converted it into a 1 column e-book =)

[Sabardeyn]

Thanks for letting us know that this worked well for you. It gives me hope for a few ancient ebooks that I've left uncorrected because of all the work involved.