Converting PDFs from Packt Publishing

[ereader123]

I used calibre 0.6.45 (Linux) to convert a pdf ebook "Python Testing" from Packt and it is about 99% OK. There are a couple of problems:

1. Every page in the pdf has a footer with a Packt logo and the sentence "This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by (me) on 19th March 2010 (then my address). The image and sentence appear in various locations on each ebook page that I read in my Kindle 2. The logo is about 1" tall and 2" wide.
2. The header on each page (the chapter title) is repeated throughout the pages as a line of text.
Is there a way to tell Calibre to ignore the headers and footers in the pdf so I can remove these rather annoying bits of text and images?

3. Bulleted lists are missing the bullet and each line has an extra line break. Is there a way to help Calibre do a better job of formatting the bullets?

4. There are many areas in the book where the author lists a sequence of steps, and then displays an image of the screen output from completing the steps. For some reason, the image of the screen output is placed before the sequence of steps in the converted file. Is this normal?

I thought of looking in the recipes, but there are too many to manually search and the forum search did not turn up anything useful for me.

I am very new to calibre and ebooks in general, so please forgive me if I have asked some dumb questions.

Thanks!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by ereader123

I used calibre 0.6.45 (Linux) to convert a pdf ebook "Python Testing" from Packt and it is about 99% OK. There are a couple of problems:

PDF conversions always have problems. PDF is a tough format to convert to an ebook. A new convererter is being written, but until then ....

1. Every page in the pdf has a footer with a Packt logo and the sentence "This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by (me) on 19th March 2010 (then my address). The image and sentence appear in various locations on each ebook page that I read in my Kindle 2. The logo is about 1" tall and 2" wide.
2. The header on each page (the chapter title) is repeated throughout the pages as a line of text.
Is there a way to tell Calibre to ignore the headers and footers in the pdf so I can remove these rather annoying bits of text and images?

Yes, look at the conversion options. I'm not the person to tell you how to do this, but there is regex control for removing header/footers and misc text. Searching on pdf and header or footer should help. Also regular expressions or regex and PDF.

3. Bulleted lists are missing the bullet and each line has an extra line break. Is there a way to help Calibre do a better job of formatting the bullets?

I've seen this, too. Anyone who answers you will being helping me (actually, my wife who converts more than I do), too.

I thought of looking in the recipes, but there are too many to manually search and the forum search did not turn up anything useful for me.

This isn't a recipe issue. It's a converter plugin issue. Someone with experience in PDF conversion should be along shortly

[animedude01]

PDF with specific formating likely won't convert well without a lot of cleanup. Maybe you can bug them about adding another format like epub or think about getting a larger screen reader.

[ereader123]

Thanks for the info. I sent Packt a note asking for other ebook formats, and I have been experimenting with the regex for removing footers. I will start a new thread with my regex questions.