Quote:
Originally Posted by lumpynose
You could think of a PDF containing a bunch of individual characters .... In effect their placement is arbitrary , ... ebook in MOBI or Kindle format the characters and words are in a continuous stream with a known order. In a PDF the order and placement isn't always as well known.
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This is nonsense. It's not how PDFs and eBooks work.
A PDF is a container. It might not have text at all, just a scanned image.
It's specifically designed for printing on paper, the same anywhere and to give an exact WYSIWYG preview on a screen. Thus unless your screen has similar resolution to a physical printer and large enough to support the "paper size", the results are rubbish on a eReader. A5 sized manuals are about usable on better ereaders. PDFs are page based, layout is for a particular paper size. The text (if there even is any) is deliberately intended NEVER to reflow.
Mobi and epub are based on the idea of HTML (the content is very like a webpage content). Thus the content has normally NO definition of pages. Both are also containers. The text need not be sequential at all. So like a webpage, the text flows. Unlike most web browsers the viewing software paginates the text based on document font size, device resolution and user's chosen margins, line spacing and text zoom level.
Conversion success depends on what is IN a PDF. If it's text, then it's best exported to a wordprocessor and global format styles used to make it ebook compatible. Some PDFs are scanned images with OCR text layer to allow search. Some considerable human proof reading / edit in the WP with the PDF in a viewer beside is needed to fix such documents.