pdf to epup one line to paragraf

[san2710]

I have a lot of books in PDF format and want to convert them to epub format. Very often the result is not good. One line in PDF is converted to paragraph at epub with one empty line between paragraphs. I tryed a few things without success. I found this recommendation "you're getting a line break after every line (basically, every line gets turned into its own paragraph) - it's just that at your preferred font size the new "paragraphs" don't fit horizontally on a single line.

This is very common when converting from PDF sources.

To fix this the right way, do this:

Open the conversion dialog as usual
Select the desired output format as usual
On the left, click on the "Heuristic Processing" category
Check "Enable heuristic processing" to enable the rest of the controls on the page
Then (and this is what will actually fix this) check "Unwrap lines". Hold your mouse over the checkbox to read the help text in a popup. Please note that this isn't 100% accurate due to the nature of PDFs, there will still be lines where the problem manifests itself, but much, much fewer. Optionally adjust the line unwrap factor right underneath (explanation follows).
Check or uncheck any other options on that page - they control different things, not paragraph unwrapping.
Convert and check the results. Retry with different unwrapping factors is not satisfactory."

This did not work in my case.
I will appreciate any help

[JSWolf]

here is the solution to the problem of converting PDF to ePub. DON'T! It doesn't work well and is more hassle than it's worth.

[dwig]

As our "resident curmudgeon" stated, the best approach is to not convert from PDF.

The second best is to not expect the conversion results to be usable as is. Expect to need to use Calibre's Editor, or Sigil, to laboriously massage the ePub conversion output into a reasonable ePub and then convert that ePub into the final format desired if it is other than ePub.

See my response in post #4 in this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=273001

[eschwartz]

Sticky: Read this before Posting PDF Questions


The problem is not that the recommendations didn't work.
The problem is that not even the recommendations are capable of fixing the catastrophic damage that was done to your book by turning it into a PDF.

(At least, I assume you tried various line unwrapping factors and failed to hit on one that satisfactorily merged together the majority of badly-split paragraphs.)


You may be able to get better results by using professional (and expensive) OCR software like ABBYY Finereader.
However, either way you will rarely be lucky enough to get a "perfect" conversion. As dwig said, you will usually have to edit the EPUB manually in order to clean up the various errors that are inevitably left behind by a PDF-to-EPUB conversion.

[BetterRed]

dwig and eschwartz

If you have Abby Fine Reader and Word 2007 or higher, you could use Toxaris' e-Book Tools add-in for Word which he has built specifically to handle the various glitches introduced by OCR conversion etc. And which he continues to enhance

I convert dozens of public domain PDF documents (not books as such) a week. In most cases I can decide after looking at a PDF whether it's worth my time converting and editing it.

Because most of the PDFs are recently created I've found Abby Fine Reader doesn't 'buy me much'. So my workflow for converting PDF's is:

• convert the PDF into PRC using Mobi Creator;
• convert the PRC to RTF with calibre;
• apply one of three relatively simple Word Templates to the RTF;
• use Epub-Tools functions, VBA macros etc to knock the RTF into shape
• save the document as DOCX;
• convert the DOCX to ePUB with calibre, or occasionally import it into the calibre editor.

The workflow is optimised to be time efficient for me. I don't enjoy fiddling with dozens of obscure OCR and conversion settings, I don't seek perfect conversions (I doubt such things exist in any sphere), and I don't worship finely crafted optimal markup. That said, the resultant code is pretty clean; I avoid fancy typography, and I use Word styles almost exclusively. I rarely need to edit the final ePub code.

The ePubs I create are not published in the public domain, I make them available to a few colleagues, and they do the same for me and the others. They have their own workflows optimised to their peccadilloes

BR

[san2710]

Thanks for all your advice. I was transferring pdf to epub because i want them to be read at Kobo or Kindle reader where i can do scaling ( increase letters) , mostly for my old mother ( her eyesight weakened), who can read now books only this way (books are not in English ). I was using some other program as Aiseesoft PDF to ePub Converter , which is using OCR but take a lot of time to convert one book and again the result is not perfect (a page number converts as new chapter). I try to use Sigil to make corrections but that is time consuming.

[BetterRed]

@san2710 - maybe this can help ==>> k2pdfopt: optimizes PDFs for viewing on e-readers

BR

[Teeny]

@san2710 For the Kindle (depending which one you have, I don't know if paperwhite are supporting this, the fire does) there's an Adobe PDF Reader app, FREE, that you can upload the pdfs in the cloud, in your account, download them in the app in your Kindle and read them through there. There are a lot of option in text size, turning pages etc.

FYI if your pdf files are before 2010 from publisher sites, before epub and mobi were popular, you might have some issues, like not all option being available, but anything after that should be fine. Note though that that might not be the issue with all the pdfs, in my experience some publishers didn't know how to correctly convert to pdf (again we are talking before e-readers became popular and epub and mobi entered our lives).