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Old 05-27-2023, 08:08 PM   #551
jhowell
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Posts: 7,086
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Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Charlottesville, VA
Device: Kindles
Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem View Post
For some reason, I was curious to know if there were any utilities to convert PDF to FXL ePub. Calibre does not support it. I found a shell script that orchestrated a conversion using Poppet and ImageMagick, but no thanks, too much.

Then I realized KFX Input would convert from Print Replica to ePub. And yes, you can convert PDF --> Print Replica with Send to Kindle and from there to ePub FXL with the plugin. It looks fine!
There are two major types of fixed layout EPUB.

The fixed layout EPUB format produced by Adobe InDesign positions each individual word on the page and depends on the font characteristics being known precisely for it to work. It is equivalent to a PDF produced from a Word document, but with much less reader support than PDF.

The fixed layout EPUB produced by the KFX Input plugin from a print replica book is much more like a PDF produced from scanning book pages into OCR software. Instead of the words being rendered on the page in a particular font it contains rasterized page images with an invisible overlay of text. That allows text selection and dictionary lookup but results in a large file that does not look great when zoomed in.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem View Post
FBut: FXL is a poor stand in for PDF, functionally. E.g., you cannot select or highlight text. So Comics, children's books maybe. But not textbooks or that sort of thing (KF8 fixed layout is the same). And not accessible to screen readers. There's a W3 draft spec to address this:
Fixed layout EPUB is a solution looking for a problem. PDF is almost always a better format to use.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tomsem View Post
Still, there may be use cases for it. I wonder if it is possible to tweak the plugin to take PDF directly and convert to ePub?
No it is not possible. Conversion of EPUB to KFX is performed by the command line interface that is built into Amazon's Kindle Previewer software. However that will not convert PDF to KFX. PDF to KFX conversion can be done using Amazon's Kindle Create software but that only has a GUI interface and cannot be invoked by the plugin.
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