MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Calibre PDF conversions

jackie_w · 09-20-2009, 06:29 PM

For anyone who's interested in the detailed findings…

PDF source was created from MSWord using CutePDF, one of those pseudo-print utilities that direct your print file to a PDF.

I got the following results when converting to LRF, EPUB or LIT using Calibre v6.13
(Look&Feel fields, Input-char-encoding and Transliterate-unicode-to-ASCII, both set to blank):-

Very good:
smart quotes (double and single)
italics, bold, bold italics
m-dash, ellipsis
currency symbols (dollar, cents, GB Pound, Euro),
Western European accented chars (e-acute, cedilla etc) Sorry, no experience with Eastern European languages so didn't try them.
fractions

OK:
Small Caps (converted to standard caps)
Ordinals (converted to standard lowercase)
Subscript, superscript (converted to standard size in EPUB/LRF – sort-of-OK, looked better in LIT)

Not so good:
Strikethrough and underline (just the underlying standard text)
Graphics (appears in converted file but not in the right place)

Using exactly the same PDF input and Calibre conversion parameters, these were the results when converting to RTF:-

All of the following special chars were replaced with a question-mark (?)
smart quotes (double and single)
m-dash, ellipsis
currency symbols (except the dollar),
fractions
accented chars (e-acute, cedilla etc)

All the other things gave the same result as for LRF, EPUB, LIT.

I tried each of the following in the Look&Feel Input-char-encoding field but none of them made any improvements:-
UTF8, UTF-8, latin1, iso-8859-1, windows-1252, cp1252

Switching on the Look&Feel Transliterate-unicode-to-ASCII before converting to RTF, did improve things a lot:-

Smart quotes, double & single, became standard quotes, double & single.
- easy enough to edit back to smart quotes in MSWord if you want to put in the effort

m-dash became -- (again, easy to edit)

Currency symbols were converted to acceptable text equivalents, e.g euro became EU (although I would have thought that GBP might be better than PS for British pound sterling)

Fractions were converted to standard size chars e.g. 1/2 and 3/4

Accented chars were converted to their standard base chars, e.g e-acute became e
- not really a problem for me, as a Brit, but not so good for French, German etc

Regards, Jackie

09-20-2009, 06:29 PM	#3
jackie_w Grand Sorcerer Posts: 6,212 Karma: 16534894 Join Date: Sep 2009 Location: UK Device: Kobo: KA1, ClaraHD, Forma, Libra2, Clara2E. PocketBook: TouchHD3	(... continued ) For anyone who's interested in the detailed findings… PDF source was created from MSWord using CutePDF, one of those pseudo-print utilities that direct your print file to a PDF. I got the following results when converting to LRF, EPUB or LIT using Calibre v6.13 (Look&Feel fields, Input-char-encoding and Transliterate-unicode-to-ASCII, both set to blank):- Very good: smart quotes (double and single) italics, bold, bold italics m-dash, ellipsis currency symbols (dollar, cents, GB Pound, Euro), Western European accented chars (e-acute, cedilla etc) Sorry, no experience with Eastern European languages so didn't try them. fractions OK: Small Caps (converted to standard caps) Ordinals (converted to standard lowercase) Subscript, superscript (converted to standard size in EPUB/LRF – sort-of-OK, looked better in LIT) Not so good: Strikethrough and underline (just the underlying standard text) Graphics (appears in converted file but not in the right place) Using exactly the same PDF input and Calibre conversion parameters, these were the results when converting to RTF:- All of the following special chars were replaced with a question-mark (?) smart quotes (double and single) m-dash, ellipsis currency symbols (except the dollar), fractions accented chars (e-acute, cedilla etc) All the other things gave the same result as for LRF, EPUB, LIT. I tried each of the following in the Look&Feel Input-char-encoding field but none of them made any improvements:- UTF8, UTF-8, latin1, iso-8859-1, windows-1252, cp1252 Switching on the Look&Feel Transliterate-unicode-to-ASCII before converting to RTF, did improve things a lot:- Smart quotes, double & single, became standard quotes, double & single. - easy enough to edit back to smart quotes in MSWord if you want to put in the effort m-dash became -- (again, easy to edit) Currency symbols were converted to acceptable text equivalents, e.g euro became EU (although I would have thought that GBP might be better than PS for British pound sterling) Fractions were converted to standard size chars e.g. 1/2 and 3/4 Accented chars were converted to their standard base chars, e.g e-acute became e - not really a problem for me, as a Brit, but not so good for French, German etc Regards, Jackie