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Old 12-07-2017, 01:04 PM   #8
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertDDL View Post
Instead of Abbyy, which costs money, you can try pdftotext, which is open source - it's a little Windows command line utility, which you can download from www.xpdfreader.com (it's included in the Xpdf tools). With the -layout option, it gives you a plain text file with line breaks that correspond to the lines in the PDF (doesn't work with all PDF files, though).

You'll still have a lot of editing to do, but with a decent editor and a little knowledge of regular expressions and a tool to convert plain text to epub you should be able to get a reasonably readable epub version in an hour or so. (I have a tool that helps with the process, but like pdftotext it's Windows command line stuff, so I don't know if you're interested.)
Robert:

Doesn't that give you, as you said, a plain text file? So that all formatting is lost? For some folks, that would be a crapload more work.

Abbyy, if I am not mistaken, has a website where you can convert a single document for free. There are limits on it, and all that, but you might try searching for that.

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