[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's your choice of PDF as a starting format that's the fundamental problem. A PDF file isn't a "book" - it doesn't contain paragraphs, sentences, or even words, as any normal text document does; it's purely drawing instructions of the form "draw this shape at these coordinates".

For future reference, you'll probably get much better results if you start with a good OCR program (Abbey FineReader works great) rather than with PDF.

To piggyback on HarryT's comments, I treat PDF as a final destination format. Although it is possible to extract text from a PDF I don't count on it. Rather, I save my ebooks in another format (OpenDocument Text) and use that as a source to generate my ebooks as a PDF.

Instead of using PDF like a text format that can be reformatted and altered, I use PDF as electronic paper. I format them for my reader's screen size and they display exactly as formatted on my reader's default size (Small). One of PDF's major strengths is that it gives you complete format control over your ebooks.

Like with printing on paper, if I want to make a change in my ebooks (such as increase the font size or the space between paragraphs) I change the source document and then regenerate the PDF. Although my reader is capable of reflowing PDFs to increase the font size, I've been dissatisfied with the way my PDF look when reflowed.