There are no good settings for converting PDFs to anything. The best option is, find some PDF converting software (I use Acrobat Pro, but not everyone has that), which could be random websites that offer free conversion, and convert to something you can edit--HTML, or Word, or TXT--and then work with that, comparing to the PDF to fix the formatting.
If you have the files from the
Spurgeongems page, those look like they should convert fairly well. You'd need RegEx to get rid of the headers & footers, but since they were created from .docx files, they should convert to a more flexible format without losing much in formatting, just with the added page breaks.
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I saved one out to a Word doc; it didn't even add page breaks. Formatting needs a bit of tweaking (especially the blue-text quotes), but looks very clean, easy to work with.
If I were combining a bunch of those to a single ebook, I'd probably start by combining them in Acrobat and saving them out as a single file. But that's probably the wrong way to do it; I'm just more familiar with Acrobat than HTML editors.