Help! 2nd L has gone MISSING!!

[Clutch]

Hi I am new to this forum and have come to you all with an important question. Every time I convert a .pdf to .mobi file to place on my kindle, every word with two "L", for example: will, call, formally all show up as: wil , cal , and formal y, the second L is always deleted and I have no idea why. I haven't changed any setting in Calibre and this has happened on numerous books. I could really use some help, this is very annoying. Thanks

[atjnjk]

Have you read this?

[zespectre]

Have you read this?

Phrasing is everything with online communications.

"this link may help you" or "See this link for useful information" are helpful and friendly phrases.

"have you read this" (when the question itself clearly indicates that the OP hasn't) make you sound snarky even when that is not what was intended.

[atjnjk]

Originally Posted by zespectre

Phrasing is everything with online communications.

"this link may help you" or "See this link for useful information" are helpful and friendly phrases.

"have you read this" (when the question itself clearly indicates that the OP hasn't) make you sound snarky even when that is not what was intended.

Thank you for your advice. I didn't think that the question sounded snarky (I meant it as a normal question because it's easy to see the sticky threads). We learn something new every day .
@Clutch. I apologize for my annoyed post, I only meant to help.

[Clutch]

Atjnjk: I had not seen that link before but it answered my question perfertly thank you very much! And your comment was in no way taken rudely or annoyingly, I appreciate your help a lot.

zespectre: Thanks for replying as well and for watching out for me, nice to know there are some nice people on forums still today.

**Finally after reading the link posted above on ligatures, have either of you had any luck using other the other forms listed, Mobipocket Creator or Acrobat Professional? Thanks for the help

[speakingtohe]

The easiest way for me is with search and replace
Takes a minute or two and is a bit tricky
first find a word in the book that should be double l's. Often easier to look in epub first
Hit magic wand (convert search and replace)
If word is 'follow' type fol into search box and hit test
Hit next
you will see fol ow
Copy entire word
Carefully delete the fo and ow leaving the l and the next character (looks like a space)
Hit ok
type ll as replacement text
make sure pdf input is selected and your prefered output is selected
Hit ok

[atjnjk]

Originally Posted by Clutch

**Finally after reading the link posted above on ligatures, have either of you had any luck using other the other forms listed, Mobipocket Creator or Acrobat Professional? Thanks for the help

Mobipocket Creator does pretty fine jobs. AFAIK, the only problem is that it uses <br> tag to split paragraphs (which doesn't work well with heuristic processing). If need be, you could use Sigil or other html editors to replace <br> with <p> tag.

[SavageNarce]

I also had the ligature problem with a PDF file. My eventual solution was to open the file in Foxit reader - which replaced the ligatures with separate characters. (I also tried this with Adobe Reader, but the result was less than successful, with odd blanks sprinkled at random through the text - Foxit works better, and it's free. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/products/reader/ to download it.)

I then selected the entire text using the Text Selection tool (requires some careful manipulation) and copied it to the clipboard. I then opened Word and pasted the clipboard into a new file, then turned on the "Show/Hide paragraph marks".

This approach made every display line end with a paragraph mark, which was not the desired result. So I did a search-and-replace to replace all periods followed by a paragraph (.^p) with a vertical pipe (|), and all closing quotes followed by a paragraph (”^p) with a vertical pipe. These marked about 98% of the "normal" paragraph breaks.

I then removed all paragraph marks and replaced them with a single space. Finally, I replaced the pipe character (|) with two paragraph marks (^p^p) to restore the appearance of normal paragraphs.

A quick search of text will allow you to find chapter headers (or other similar text) and make them into Word header styles - this is not absolutely necessary, but makes things more tidy. Then you can save the file as RTF and import it to Calibre for conversion to other formats, if desired.

The resulting text was 98% perfect. There were a couple of occasions where a paragraph was inserted incorrectly, but this was a vast improvement over the previous text with all of the ligatures screwed up.

I haven't tested this approach with other editors like Google Docs or Open Office, but it should work, as long as they allow you to do a search-and-replace for paragraph marks.

Total conversion time from PDF to RTF was probably about 10 to 15 minutes. If I were doing this on a regular basis, I would probably record the search-and-replace procedure to a Word Macro, which would make it even faster.

[SavageNarce]

Evidently Google Docs does NOT allow you to find/replace paragraph marks, but Open Office DOES allow this - although I have not tested it myself.

[Clutch]

Thanks for all the responses, i'll give them a shot this weekend!

[WitchyWolf]

Thank you SavageNarce. Your post was very helpful.

I had several PDFs that would lose the double-L upon conversion to any format when using Calibre. These PDFs were created with a Python PDF Converter tool of some knd. I did some experimenting based on SavageNarce's post and here is what I found worked best for me:

1. Used Foxit Reader to open the PDF. Clicked Edit and Select All to have Foxit highlight all the text for me.
2. Copied that to Word 2010 and did a Save As, selecting Rich Text Format as the type so I had an original to fall back to in case I goofed up something. Also turned on the Show/Hide Paragraph Marks feature so I could see the spaces and paragraph marks.
3. Used the Replace tool to find and replace the following:
First Replace: find .^p (period and paragraph mark) replace with .| (period and vertical bar)
Second Replace: find "^p (double-quote and paragraph mark) replace with "| (double-quote and vertical bar)
Third Replace: find ^p (paragraph mark) replace with one blank space
Fourth Replace: find | (vertical bar) and replace with ^p (one paragraph mark)

I found that using one paragraph mark gave me a more readable output once I loaded it into Calibre and converted to ePub. The whole process took about 10 minutes once I had the process down.