Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster.
I have a PDF (yes, I know the caveats of PDF conversion) copy of a book I'm trying to get converted to ePub to read on my NC because I just don't care to read PDFs there. I own the physical book as well but obviously would prefer not to lug it around since I always have my NC with me.
Took a Hail Mary shot at a straight conversion with calibre and as expected the results were less than stellar. No page breaks, table contents not converted but spread down the page one cell per line, etc. Also the book has a lot of simple math notation, primarily fractions and ratios -- the fractions are expressed in horizontal bar form, not like x/y, and the numerators and bars get dropped in the conversion, leaving only the denominator. Stuff like that. Basically makes the conversion useless.
Okay, so realizing the limitations of PDF conversion, I loaded up the PDF in NitroPDF Pro and exported as a Word DOC. It exported cleanly and looks beautiful in Word 2007. But calibre doesn't support DOC, so I saved as ODT which is supported. LibreOffice refused to open the ODT, so I suspect some special Microsoft sauce had been applied (big surprise), and trying to get a valid ODT out of Libre failed because it somewhat mangles the DOC file presentation. Calibre churned on the Word-generated ODT for nearly 20 minutes before producing an even worse conversion than from the PDF.
Seeing that RTF is a supported source format, I tried that next. Saved as RTF, previewed RTF in Word, looked great. Tried to convert, it's also worse than the PDF attempt.
Next tried HTML. Saved as HTML from Word, calibre bundled it all up nicely in a ZIP before producing a likewise worse-than-PDF conversion. I'm aware of the horrible HTML Word tends to generate so not terribly surprised there, I guess.
I'm trying to find some combination of format conversions that will help me, but no luck so far. I have this perfect DOC file just taunting me -- I feel like it should be easy to get it into ePub even if by some circuitous route, but I'm stumped. I'm actually surprised that the PDF conversion is the most readable, such that it is, of all the other formats I've tried thus far.
Any ideas on intermediate conversions or settings tweaks I might be able to make to get this done? I've tried with heuristics on and off, but otherwise haven't attempted to tweak much.
TIA!
David