Quote:
Originally Posted by ChipAHoy
On Calibre, I have a book that is in MOBI, PDF and AZW3. I transferred the ebook to my Kindle Paperweight reader. The format is a mess, sometimes there is text just on the left side of the screen in a narrow column, there are page headings in the middle of text, the spacing is all over, etc.
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As dwig has stated, the other formats could have been auto-generated.
For example, Archive.org offers their ebooks as the original PDF scans OR a multitude of alternate formats (EPUB, MOBI, TXT, [...]).
To get these alternate formats, usually the PDF is just fed through an automatic conversion. As you found out, these alternate formats are typically full of errors (typos, bad formatting, missing text, still have page numbers, broken paragraphs, etc. etc.).
Something like a basic Fiction book might turn out "okay", but the more complicated the book, the worse errors are going to be (footnotes messed up, tables broken, formulas missing, [...]).
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChipAHoy
Just tried PDF and this is the most readable version. Is converting to PDF the best option, then?
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PDF was built as a final OUTPUT format, but it is one of the absolute worst as an INPUT format... and it requires a lot of manual labor to clean and correct to create a great ebook.
If you want to read on your Kindle, your best bet would be to try to find an actual ebook version of the book: from the library, find on Project Gutenburg, purchase from B&N/Amazon, find on the MobileRead EPUB section, etc.
If you are stuck with the PDF, the best way is to read the PDF on a larger device (tablet, computer).
If you want to TRY to make the PDF a little more palatable for the Kindle, you may have some luck with
willus's k2pdfopt program.
There is no easy/automatic way to convert from PDF to ebook with satisfactory results. If you still want to pursue manual cleanup, you need to get your hands dirty. There has been a lot of discussion about this over the years, here are two of the topics where PDF -> ebook was discussed:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=223817
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=2878245