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Old 11-16-2011, 12:57 PM   #1
sebtombs
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PDF to MOBI scrambles "th" and "ft"

I know that PDF conversion is hard, but this one is a bit weird. Every instance of "th" in a document that I have just converted is rendered on the Kindle as what looks like a Greek character, and "ft" has become a small square.

Is this a known PDF->MOBI issue in Calibre, or more likely to be a Kindle AZW problem?
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Old 11-16-2011, 01:05 PM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sebtombs View Post
I know that PDF conversion is hard, but this one is a bit weird. Every instance of "th" in a document that I have just converted is rendered on the Kindle as what looks like a Greek character, and "ft" has become a small square.

Is this a known PDF->MOBI issue in Calibre, or more likely to be a Kindle AZW problem?
Those are probably Ligatures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature

Coupled with what you read in the Sticky a(above) about PDF, it should not be a surprise that there will be problems like this.
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Old 11-16-2011, 03:33 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sebtombs View Post
I know that PDF conversion is hard, but this one is a bit weird. Every instance of "th" in a document that I have just converted is rendered on the Kindle as what looks like a Greek character, and "ft" has become a small square.

Is this a known PDF->MOBI issue in Calibre, or more likely to be a Kindle AZW problem?
I agree with theducks.

What has probably happened is that the app that built the PDF replaced all of the "th" and "ft" letter combinations with ligatures. This means that all of the "th" and "ft" combinations seen in the PDF are not letter pairs but a single special character.

It is these special characters that aren't converting well. You could try converting to some editable format (HTML, ePUB, ...) and using Search&Replace to sweep the document replacing the "bogus" characters with the proper letter pair replacements.
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