Troubleshooting Kindle Chapter Markers on PDF

[sam.selikoff]

Can the Kindle recognize chapter markers on PDFs? Does anybody know of a way to add chapter markers to a PDF, maybe via Calibre or some other program?

I'm on a mac.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by sam.selikoff

Can the Kindle recognize chapter markers on PDFs? Does anybody know of a way to add chapter markers to a PDF, maybe via Calibre or some other program?

I'm on a mac.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a PDF 'chapter marker,' as that is not a concept that PDF embodies, but the answer is "no". Kindle does not support PDF links, the usual means of creating a Table of Contents in the PDF with clickable links that navigate to the beginning of a chapter.

However what you can do is create bookmarks or (on K3) annotations and highlights on any page you choose. This may help a little with navigation, but is by no means ideal. For example you might bookmark the TOC to make it a little easier to navigate there, and then you can use Go To... to jump to the relevant page number of the chapter referenced in the TOC. If there's an Index, you could set a bookmark to more easily jump there. You could also set bookmarks at the beginning of each chapter, and these will be visually represented in the reading progress bar as little tick marks. Or instead of bookmarks you could add an annotation, or highlight chapter headings, then use 'View Notes & Marks" to navigate within the document.

Keep in mind that bookmarks and annotations that you make to a PDF (saved in a '.pdr' sidecar file) are not backed up by Amazon, so you might consider backing these up to your computer, in case you remove the .pdf and later restore it to your Kindle.

[sam.selikoff]

Devastating.

Maybe I could copy the pages of the PDF to pages in a Word/Pages document as inline images, add titles, and then convert to epub.

Any thoughts on how to automate this process? Also, do you by any chance know which Pages titles will create chapter markers when converted to epub?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by sam.selikoff

Devastating.

Maybe I could copy the pages of the PDF to pages in a Word/Pages document as inline images, add titles, and then convert to epub.

Any thoughts on how to automate this process? Also, do you by any chance know which Pages titles will create chapter markers when converted to epub?

Pages generates TOC from text that uses one of the TOC Paragraph Styles. However, unless I'm missing something, it won't export the TOC to ePub (I get a warning about 'some features like tables' not getting exported).

Open Office can also export ePub (not sure about its recent offshoot, LibreOffice - perhaps the OO ePub extension is compatible?). I don't know if either can export a linked TOC.

But you might first try using calibre to convert the PDF directly to mobi format (after cropping any headers/footers). Calibre can generate a TOC based on some pattern matching (customizable). To read on Kindle, you'll have to convert ePub to mobi anyway, and calibre can do that also if you wind up going that route.

In general, PDF is probably the worst format to start with if you want to create nicely reflowable content. And rather than using an intermediate format like .doc, it is probably better to go directly to XHTML, provided you have some HTML skills and tools. But it is so painful to achieve the quality I desire, that I usually give up and just live with the limitations of Kindle's PDF viewer.