Epub exactly as PDF - Page 2

Toxaris · 02-08-2014, 01:29 PM

There is no good solution for PDF conversion. Get back to the basics and recreate it as an ePUB.

Hitch · 02-08-2014, 04:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toxaris

There is no good solution for PDF conversion. Get back to the basics and recreate it as an ePUB.

+100.

Sorry, but this is square peg--round holing. It just is. There's no magic bullet for making PDF's into ePUBs. You can do it fairly simply if you just have fiction PDF's, but even then...there's a difference between the image layer and the content layer. Want to see it in action? Take ANY PDF that is searchable, and find, say, 5-10 sentences that have punctuation above the normal. Question marks, semi-colons, and the like. Also make sure you get some words with f's in them. Then copy lines from the PDF. Open Word, and paste the text NOT INTO the document, but into the Search box, and see what you get. THAT is what is really being put into the Word document, and the underlying HTML: not the text one sees with their eyes.

I just had some guy on Google+ tell some other poor schlub with "hundreds" of PDF's to convert to put the PDF's into GoogleDocs, and then use the resulting text to make ePUBs. At that point, I just gave up, because of course, the schlub came back raving about how it was so easy, and he'd made two books in a day! (I am assuming he hasn't proofed them yet). {shrug}. Image layer, content layer. Not the same. I presume that someday, Adobe will come out with an ACTUAL way to export PDF into something usable, but I'm not holding my breath. (not to mention: lots of PDF's in the world NOT made with Adobe, and those are even worse. Ever try to 'convert' a Quark-created PDF? Oh, frabjous day.)

Hitch

AlPe · 02-09-2014, 03:52 PM

Yeah, the problem is indeed the way a given PDF is output.

In general the problem is so hard, that starting from scratch (sometimes even the plain text cannot be copied properly!) is the best way to go.

(Not to mention the embarassing number of "Conversion services! For cheap! Any language, Groundhoggese included! PDF to EPUB3!" which create EPUBs which are a sequence of images inside an EPUB3 container (!) or they use stuff like pdf2htmlEX to get a "sort of EPUB3 FXL, but you need Javascript to actually see it"...)

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02-08-2014, 01:29 PM	#16
Toxaris Wizard Posts: 4,520 Karma: 121692313 Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Heemskerk, NL Device: PRS-T1, Kobo Touch, Kobo Aura	There is no good solution for PDF conversion. Get back to the basics and recreate it as an ePUB.

02-09-2014, 03:52 PM	#18
AlPe Digital Amanuensis Posts: 727 Karma: 1446357 Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Turin, Italy Device: Several eReaders and tablets	Yeah, the problem is indeed the way a given PDF is output. In general the problem is so hard, that starting from scratch (sometimes even the plain text cannot be copied properly!) is the best way to go. (Not to mention the embarassing number of "Conversion services! For cheap! Any language, Groundhoggese included! PDF to EPUB3!" which create EPUBs which are a sequence of images inside an EPUB3 container (!) or they use stuff like pdf2htmlEX to get a "sort of EPUB3 FXL, but you need Javascript to actually see it"...)

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