converting pdf to epub

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Shohreh

Before I dive into Caliber… is there a quick, no-brainer way to get a readable ePUB file?

If you only want to get rid of the unwanted line-breaks and your .pdf file already has a text layer, you could try converting the .pdf with Calibre.

If you enable all Heuristics options (Preferences > Common Options > Heuristic Processing), Calibre will fix most unwanted line-breaks.

However, as Hitch has already pointed out, there is no perfect automated PDF to EPUB converter and you'll most likely have to post-edit the book.

[Shohreh]

I just tried this, and it seems to work fine when lowering Line un-wrap factor to 0.25.

I understand PDF is a terrible format to use as input, but it's all I have.

Thank you.

[HarryT]

A decent OCR program, such as "Abbyy FineReader" tends to produce the best results, particularly on documents with more complex formatting. As Hitch says, though, that gets you a "first draft"; it has to be followed by a round of manual proofing and correction.

[Notjohn]

I have scanned a couple of backlist books using Abbyy Finereader, saved to a Word doc. It does a great job, but even 99.9% correct means a lot of typos in a book of 100,000 words (= 500,000 characters x 0.1% = 500). Quite apart from all else, it's a whole lot easier to proof in a Word doc than an epub.

In both books, interestingly, the same error predominated: a lower-case M presented as lower-case RN.

I use Word2CleanHtml dot com to get clean html from the Word docx. There are of course many other ways to do the same, but this is quick and easy and all but flawless. I open the html file in Sigil and go from there.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

I have scanned a couple of backlist books using Abbyy Finereader, saved to a Word doc. It does a great job, but even 99.9% correct means a lot of typos in a book of 100,000 words (= 500,000 characters x 0.1% = 500). Quite apart from all else, it's a whole lot easier to proof in a Word doc than an epub.

The e-Book Tools - a Word add-in has a number of features specifically targeted at cleaning up PDF conversions, it can also create the EPUB, and fire up Sigil after doing so.

If I didn't already have Word I would buy it just so I could use this free add-in.

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

The e-Book Tools - a Word add-in has a number of features specifically targeted at cleaning up PDF conversions, it can also create the EPUB, and fire up Sigil after doing so.

If I didn't already have Word I would buy it just so I could use this free add-in.

BR

Red:

You're right, I should have mentioned Tox'es wonderful addin. It's perfect for this.

Hitch