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Originally Posted by Shohreh
Turns out that PDFs with simple layouts are readable by enabling "Reflow text" and "Crop margins" in the Bookeen Saga. Headers are still displayed but I can live with that, as long as footnotes are preserved.
I'm still curious about why PDFs are a problem on small e-readers, though. Is it because PDF is actually a graphical language underneath, with no notion of text (what looks like text to humans is just graphics under the hood, and could just as well be pictures), so the software can't easily "reflow" the text to fit a smaller screen?
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The 'Reflow Text' works with very few PDFs.
PDFs are a problem because the designer / publisher sets a physical page size. What looks like text can be text, or not. It can be program code generating text, actual text, vectors or bit-map images or a mix of these on different logical layers. The text in a PDF need not even be sequential so copy/paste or 'reflow' may even change the ordering of sentences, words, paragraphs, images, captions and headings on the screen vs the original virtual page.
A PDF has a design time physical page. The only way to display it electronically without breaking it (and sometimes at all) is either to shrink it to fit (will usually make it unreadable), or use the screen as view port you pan around the virtual page. It is not an ebook, but a preview of a paper print job. Forcing a 'reflow' hardly ever works well and not at all if it's complex or a scan. The user can't change fonts, font size, margins (other than crop, which nearly all viewers inc Kobo can do) or line-spacing.
I've tried programs like that on the Onyx, almost none of my PDFs reflow.
A real ebook has only content. It has nothing about page or screen sizes, though images may be set to resize to suit a screen (any size screen). A properly designed ebook lets the user change fonts, font size, side margins and line-spacing. Sometimes justification can be changed. If you "zoom" in or out the number of pages change and it reflows.
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For those not having Microsoft Word and its apparently excellent Reflow feature to read a PDF and convert it to text… what about the following :
PDF → k2pdtopt → Calibre/LibreOffice Draw → EPUB
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Fantasy.
Also MS Word is hardly better than free Libre Office. If you can't copy / paste good text from a PDF viewer into Word it won't help, and if you can then free LO Writer is perfect.
Once in a blue moon I'll try and convert a PDF and it's rarely smooth. Often converting it to image, OCR and proof the OCR in LO Writer works best.
Unless you have the rights and are publishing, or it's reference you need frequently portable (and you've nothing portable the PDF is any use on) you don't convert a PDF to epub. Too much work.