PDF Conversion: simple & neat

[wtw1936]

Calibre is far and away the best free program around for creating an ebook library. Because other's in my family need the epub and mobi formats, I routinely convert all new ebooks not already in those formats. But if the new ebook is in pdf that seems to expose a weak point in Calibre. Only with an exorbitant amount of fussing with regular expressions (which need to be different for nearly every book) can I get any reasonable output. Conversions done with default parameters and no regular expressions are near useless. The common problem is that page headers & footers get blended into the text in a very annoying way.

I've recently found a simple solution. If the pdf file is opened with MobiPocket Reader (all default settings), a *.prc file is created and saved (on my Windows XP system) in MyDocuments\My eBooks. Then I use Calibre's "Add Books" to open the *.prc file, edit Metadata to get proper Title/Author/Synopsis/Cover, and convert to desired format. While MobiPocket Reader solves the header/footer problem, but there are still some minor problems like paragraphs with no blank line between. While not perfect, the result is quite readable and is very easy to accomplish.