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Originally Posted by Amalthia
I've tried using Calibre to convert PDFs sometimes it works and other times it's a mess. Like one pdf had no paragraph breaks so large portions of the text would run together and I don't get why that happened because the PDF had blank space between each paragraph.
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Very likely an untagged PDF, where the original file had line breaks instead of returns after paragraphs (as would happen if someone printed to PDF from many fanfic websites). Some programs' PDFs are horrible for later conversion; Maya's fanfic was made on some Mac program that loses all paragraph breaks when converted.
Adding tags to the PDFs usually helps and sometimes fixes the problem entirely. I don't know of any free or cheap software that'll do that, though.
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Finally, I just gave up because of the lack of consistancy. It seemed like it depended on how the PDF was made on whether or not it would look good on conversion.
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PDFs made from Word tend to be okay (and often these are tagged), except for what they do to tables. Made from InDesign is hit-or-miss; it depends on what formatting features were active. Made from simple word processing programs on a Mac are awful. Haven't seen enough made from Linux programs to have any thoughts on those yet.
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Now I just ask authors if they have a single file version not in PDF, or ask my friends if anyone has merged it already. I just wish more authors would use archives based on efiction rather than LJ.
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LJ's for social; efiction's for archiving. A lot of authors will ignore good archiving features in order to encourage comments. LJ stories get a lot more comments than ones posted pretty much anywhere else.
If you've got nightmare PDFs that you really want converted, drop me a line.