PDF -> EPUB conversion

[bluepeter]

When possible, I like to buy e-books directly from the author, for all the obvious reasons.

There's a writer whose work I enjoy. She sells books directly. So far, so good.

The problem is that her books are delivered as PDF files. This is far from ideal for reading on the small e-readers that I favour.

Will Calibre convert PDF files to reflowable EPUB or KEPUB? If so, how good a job does it do? (I don't know if it's relevant, but the books in question will be pure text, with no illustrations.)

[Quoth]

No.
You might try copy & paste or edit in Word/LO Writer.

Worse case you need to OCR.

PDF is intended for a fixed size per page and exactly as printed on paper.

The only thing worse is a fax image of text.

Even "pure text" PDFs need edited in a wordprocessor.

[bluepeter]

Originally Posted by Quoth

No.

Bother! As I feared.

Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to carry on buying her books from Kobo, then.

Thank you.

Originally Posted by Quoth

PDF is intended for a fixed size per page and exactly as printed on paper.

Yes, indeed. It was knowing that that prompted me to ask the question. I'm glad I did.

[BetterRed]

The following applies to PDFs that were created over the last decade or so, and it's based on converting a few hundred PDFs to ebook formats over that period.

Over that period Word and Wordperfect have both done a pretty good job of importing 'contemporaneous' PDFs that were exported from either and LO Writer. Word and I'm told by a couple of collaborators Wordperfect too, has improved over that period (i.e Word 2025 is better than Word 2012). I have not tried importing PDF's into a recent version of LO Writer but I'd be surprised if it wasn't the same.

Wordperfect can export an EPUB from an imported PDF. Word can save an imported PDF as DOCX… and probably LO Writer too. There are several ways to convert a DOCX to EPUB… my current preference is to import the DOCX into the calibre ebook-editor and save the EPUB from it.

I have an inkling the ebook-editor in the upcoming calibre release will support Kobo formats alongside the existing support for EPUB and AZW formats.

Added: Last week it took me about 15 minutes to convert a 200,000 word novel from PDF to EPUB. I then spent another 30 minutes in Word dealing with chapter and scene breaks.

BR

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bluepeter

When possible, I like to buy e-books directly from the author, for all the obvious reasons.

There's a writer whose work I enjoy. She sells books directly. So far, so good.

The problem is that her books are delivered as PDF files. This is far from ideal for reading on the small e-readers that I favour.

Will Calibre convert PDF files to reflowable EPUB or KEPUB? If so, how good a job does it do? (I don't know if it's relevant, but the books in question will be pure text, with no illustrations.)

Why not contact this author and ask if you can get ePub version instead of PDF? Also suggest she stop selling PDF as that is a very bad business decision.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

The following applies to PDFs that were created over the last decade or so, and it's based on converting a few hundred PDFs to ebook formats over that period.

Over that period Word and Wordperfect have both done a pretty good job of importing 'contemporaneous' PDFs that were exported from either and LO Writer. Word and I'm told by a couple of collaborators Wordperfect too, has improved over that period (i.e Word 2025 is better than Word 2012). I have not tried importing PDF's into a recent version of LO Writer but I'd be surprised if it wasn't the same.

Wordperfect can export an EPUB from an imported PDF. Word can save an imported PDF as DOCX… and probably LO Writer too. There are several ways to convert a DOCX to EPUB… my current preference is to import the DOCX into the calibre ebook-editor and save the EPUB from it.

I have an inkling the ebook-editor in the upcoming calibre release will support Kobo formats alongside the existing support for EPUB and AZW formats.

Added: Last week it took me about 15 minutes to convert a 200,000 word novel from PDF to EPUB. I then spent another 30 minutes in Word dealing with chapter and scene breaks.

BR

How long did it take you to fix all of the errors?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why not contact this author and ask if you can get ePub version instead of PDF? Also suggest she stop selling PDF as that is a very bad business decision.

Do YOU know who the intended target is??
If it is a School, then PDF is fine because schools furnish students with taxpayer paid for LAPTOPS.
OTOH if the book was for General Public AND NOT a book that needs fixed layout.;. I would agree.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I have an inkling the ebook-editor in the upcoming calibre release will support Kobo formats alongside the existing support for EPUB and AZW formats.

Added: Last week it took me about 15 minutes to convert a 200,000 word novel from PDF to EPUB. I then spent another 30 minutes in Word dealing with chapter and scene breaks.

BR

For a straight forward (little or no images) Novel, that is a very good touchup time.
I just use the Editor and Sigil (each has things that work best for me. No One Size for me). Ligatures in PDF are my bane. those do not convert well

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How long did it take you to fix all of the errors?

No 'errors' to fix apart from the graphics in chapter and scene breaks, which we always scrap in favour of something simple.

BR

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I have an inkling the ebook-editor in the upcoming calibre release will support Kobo formats alongside the existing support for EPUB and AZW formats.

Confirmed

BR

[Sarmat89]

Every PDF generated from a text-processing software can be easily converted to HTML: every word is measured and correctly positioned, the text is in logical order, etc.
It gets more complicated if you need to keep formatting, but it is still easy.

[bluepeter]

@BetterRed: Thanks for the info. This would be helpful if a PDF was the only format in which the books that I want to read were available. However, in this particular case, it's simpler for me just to buy a pre-existing EPUB from a different source. I'd rather spend my time reading than converting

@JSWolf: Yes, I could contact the author. But I don't think it worth the effort when I can already just buy an EPUB elsewhere. I agree that selling only PDFs is a bad choice. But it's the author's choice to make.

@theducks: I'm talking about novels written for the general public in this case. Fixed layout is far from being a necessity.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bluepeter

@JSWolf: Yes, I could contact the author. But I don't think it worth the effort when I can already just buy an EPUB elsewhere. I agree that selling only PDFs is a bad choice. But it's the author's choice to make.

But you already paid for these eBooks. It would not cost anything to ask for ePub versions and to mention that selling PDF is not good for people not reading it on a tablet or computer. And it could get the author to stop selling PDF

[bluepeter]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But you already paid for these eBooks.

No, I haven't. The ones that I've already read were bought from Kobo and Amazon, and are already in KEPUB format (after conversion from AZW3 in Calibre where necessary). I'm talking here about those of her books that I haven't yet bought/read.

[capink]

Originally Posted by bluepeter

Will Calibre convert PDF files to reflowable EPUB or KEPUB? If so, how good a job does it do? (I don't know if it's relevant, but the books in question will be pure text, with no illustrations.)

Calibre is the best ebook converter out there, but when it comes to converting from PDF, the best tool in my experience has been Microsoft Word. You use word to save the book as docx, and then use calibre to convert the docx to whatever ebook format you want.

Edit: The above option would only work with text based PDFs, as pointed out by Quoth.

For image based PDFs, you have one of two solutions:

• Reflow the PDF document using a tool like k2pdfopt, which can be integrated with calibre using the K2pdfopt plugin.
• Use an OCR program. Results will vary depending on the software and the language(s) of the document you are converting. It works well with English and other Latin alphabets, but for RTL text, it sometimes produces unreadable gibberish.