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Old 02-08-2014, 04:33 PM   #17
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Phoenix, AZ
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Toxaris View Post
There is no good solution for PDF conversion. Get back to the basics and recreate it as an ePUB.
+100.

Sorry, but this is square peg--round holing. It just is. There's no magic bullet for making PDF's into ePUBs. You can do it fairly simply if you just have fiction PDF's, but even then...there's a difference between the image layer and the content layer. Want to see it in action? Take ANY PDF that is searchable, and find, say, 5-10 sentences that have punctuation above the normal. Question marks, semi-colons, and the like. Also make sure you get some words with f's in them. Then copy lines from the PDF. Open Word, and paste the text NOT INTO the document, but into the Search box, and see what you get. THAT is what is really being put into the Word document, and the underlying HTML: not the text one sees with their eyes.

I just had some guy on Google+ tell some other poor schlub with "hundreds" of PDF's to convert to put the PDF's into GoogleDocs, and then use the resulting text to make ePUBs. At that point, I just gave up, because of course, the schlub came back raving about how it was so easy, and he'd made two books in a day! (I am assuming he hasn't proofed them yet). {shrug}. Image layer, content layer. Not the same. I presume that someday, Adobe will come out with an ACTUAL way to export PDF into something usable, but I'm not holding my breath. (not to mention: lots of PDF's in the world NOT made with Adobe, and those are even worse. Ever try to 'convert' a Quark-created PDF? Oh, frabjous day.)

Hitch
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