Using MobiPocket Creator to convert PDF to PRC

[Bilbo1967]

I recall seeing somewhere in these forums that it's easy to convert pdf to prc files using MobiPocket Creator (just a drag and drop exercise is what I remember reading).

I now have MobiPocket Creator and I just can't see how you do it at all - let alone easily! Could some kind person please put my out of my misery and just tell me what to do?!?

[Nate the great]

On the Home screen of MobiCreator, one of the options is import from PDF. Click on it, select the PDF to be imported and press enter.

[Bilbo1967]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

On the Home screen of MobiCreator, one of the options is import from PDF. Click on it, select the PDF to be imported and press enter.

Nate, thanks for the very swift response.

Unfortunately, on the home page of MobiCreator, the only Import From options I have are HTML, MS Word and Text - no mention of PDF?

[Nate the great]

I see it on mine. What version are you using, home or publisher? (You really should be using the publisher edition. It has more features.)

For now, click on one of the other import options, then select the PDF you want. It should still work.

In the future, you should think about using Book Designer to do this. It is much much much much much better at converting from PDFs.

[Bilbo1967]

I already use Book Designer.

Are you saying that its better (and simpler) to use this to convert PDF to PRC?

[Nate the great]

Yes, so long as you don't mind losing the pictures.

[Bilbo1967]

Don't really care about pictures, so I'll give that a go.

[HarryT]

Moved to the Mobi forum. This has nothing to do with LRF!

[Bilbo1967]

No you're right, it doesn't - sorry!

[gerraldo]

Just a quick reminder: You can convert PDF to Mobi by just drag&drop the file to MobiReader bookshelf - works very well in most cases...

[nerys]

Thanks to this thread I can finally convert pdf to prc for the kindle

calibre was butcher the pdf pretty badly :-)

one issue.

it REMOVES the line space between each paragraph (but it DOES retain all other formatting)

is there anyway to stop it from doing this? it makes it a lot harder to read when all the paragraphs are together like that.

[babarous]

So glad I found this thread, the Mobipocket Creator is just what I have been looking for! Yeah, it messes up the blank lines between paragraphs, but it does FAR less garbling than Calibre to my pdf's.

[bear4hunter]

If you have some spare time, you could try PDF to HTML first, tidy up the code, and use mobipocket creator to build PRC from HTML.

For this, I mostly use PDFREFLOW found here.

In short time, you can get familiar with using styles like I did:

<style type="text/css">
p {text-indent: 1em; margin-top: 5;}
</style>

Above a sample of the style a define in the HTML-HEAD.

If you define a style for normal paragraphs with margin-top, you get the "line space" inbetween. Just play around with the value suiting your needs, 5 (pixel) isn't a full line, but enough to notice and make better reading experience.

I always cross-check the HTML, check the "look" in a browser window, quick compare the layout with the PDF, insert pagebreaks between the chapters and extra lines between paragraphs like in the PDF etc.

You can do it in less than an hour, if you are not perfectionist enough to want perfect looking books.

[babarous]

PDFREFLOW does good on normal pdf's, but so do most programs. Any tips on those old book scans Got a few from google books, but the prc's I generate from them are just the page images made into a prc file. The text still looks scanned and crappy.

[bear4hunter]

@ babarous
Try exporting to txt or rtf, the output might need more touching up/proof reading, but it's worth the try...
(For what I know, Acrobat does some sort of OCR on the scans in order to generate TXT, so text recognisation depends heavily on the quality of the scan)

I found both PDF to DOC to HTML as well as PDF to HTML to "messy", cleaning the REFLOW-Code to me is much easier.