[Lukusaukko]

I've read the forums and saw that this question has come up in the past, and the answer has been that "it's in development" - however, these posts have been several years old, and the latest version still makes a mess of multiple column pdf's.
There are a few Linux-based tools that can convert multicolumn files relatively easily, such as pdftotext, but that removes italics and bolding. pdftohtml can also do it, but its output requires quite a lot of manual work to convert into a single-column format suitable for epub conversion. I've also tried using k2pdfopt to convert a pdf into single-column format to pass on to calibre, but that makes calibre choke - probably because the resulting file is not internally a true single-column pdf despite looking like it in a viewers.
Has the development of this functionality for Calibre been abandoned? Or are there any other tools - preferably available in linux - besides Acrobat itself that could be used to convert a multi-column pdf into epub or at least some intermediate format with italics and bolding intact?