Quote:
Originally Posted by johnnytruant
I've never liked pdfs. Unless I was printing something, of course. In which case they're great.
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Yes, that's the reason why PDF is not really a good format for ebooks, but a de facto standard for commercial printers
To expand a bit on Acrobat, I see you don't like it. While I tend to agree with you (even on Windows their Update Manager is among the worst pieces of crap I've seen) you could try running it in a VM. I don't think Wine'll work too well.
It has a tacked-on "Save to HTML 3.2" which still has given me reasonably good results from Acrobat 8. This will normally give a reflowable html file with a different font tag for each level (title, subtitle, quote, body text), but not thousands of different <span> tags. I can read it directly in my reader (I'm using an iLiad), and also reformat it or extract the text with Openoffice or grep/sed if I want other font sizes or styles.
This assumes that your PDF is text, not scanned pages, and also that it is single column. Images will sometimes make it to the proper position, sometimes not. Depending on your source PDF you might get working links, DTP programs usually include an option to create linked TOC/endnotes when generating a PDF.
If your PDF has a more fancy layout with multiple columns, images outside the textflow and whatnot, the postprocessing necessary may be doable but a bit of work. The above solution still gives the best quick results I've seen.
Using evince, I guess you're on some kind of Unix (Linux?) as I am... I solve that problem by remoteing into my work machine when I need to use Windows software. I don't need to to do that very often anymore
Anyway, good luck! If you find alternative solutions that work, please post them here!