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wtw1936 · 10-01-2011, 05:46 PM

Calibre is far and away the best free program around for creating an ebook library. Because other's in my family need the epub and mobi formats, I routinely convert all new ebooks not already in those formats. But if the new ebook is in pdf that seems to expose a weak point in Calibre. Only with an exorbitant amount of fussing with regular expressions (which need to be different for nearly every book) can I get any reasonable output. Conversions done with default parameters and no regular expressions are near useless. The common problem is that page headers & footers get blended into the text in a very annoying way.

I've recently found a simple solution. If the pdf file is opened with MobiPocket Reader (all default settings), a *.prc file is created and saved (on my Windows XP system) in MyDocuments\My eBooks. Then I use Calibre's "Add Books" to open the *.prc file, edit Metadata to get proper Title/Author/Synopsis/Cover, and convert to desired format. While MobiPocket Reader solves the header/footer problem, but there are still some minor problems like paragraphs with no blank line between. While not perfect, the result is quite readable and is very easy to accomplish.

10-01-2011, 05:46 PM	#1
wtw1936 Member Posts: 15 Karma: 3488 Join Date: Aug 2011 Device: Kindle	PDF Conversion: simple & neat Calibre is far and away the best free program around for creating an ebook library. Because other's in my family need the epub and mobi formats, I routinely convert all new ebooks not already in those formats. But if the new ebook is in pdf that seems to expose a weak point in Calibre. Only with an exorbitant amount of fussing with regular expressions (which need to be different for nearly every book) can I get any reasonable output. Conversions done with default parameters and no regular expressions are near useless. The common problem is that page headers & footers get blended into the text in a very annoying way. I've recently found a simple solution. If the pdf file is opened with MobiPocket Reader (all default settings), a .prc file is created and saved (on my Windows XP system) in MyDocuments\My eBooks. Then I use Calibre's "Add Books" to open the .prc file, edit Metadata to get proper Title/Author/Synopsis/Cover, and convert to desired format. While MobiPocket Reader solves the header/footer problem, but there are still some minor problems like paragraphs with no blank line between. While not perfect, the result is quite readable and is very easy to accomplish.