Is there a trick to PDF conversion?

[j_dunn]

OK everything I have convert fine except PDFs which for some reason convert through Calibre nothing like how other programs convert them.

Example:

I have a PDF that is just text, I put it on my 505 with the Sony E-Library software and it looks decent. Page breaks occur where they are in the PDF, if a page break occurs say in the middle of a "screen" then it leaves everything below the last line blank rather than spilling over the next page on it, etc. Same thing if I convert it with Convertdoc.

Now, if I convert it to epub or lrf with Calibre (in order to set up the metadata properly) it gets rid of all of the page breaks, or I should say it keeps them but the pages blend into one another instead of having buffer space on them, and instead of the reader saying "page 1 of 200" on each page it reads "page 1-2 of 200" on every other page or so as it is showing multiple pages on the same screen.

Is there some setting I am overlooking in Calibre? I've tried looking at all the "convert ebook" options but can't find anything that forces it to add the buffer space for the pages. Any idea or am I just going to have to depend on Sony's software (and manually editing the metadata) to get it looking right?

[kovidgoyal]

calibre merges mages when converting from PDF as this is usually the desired behavior when reflowing PDF

[j_dunn]

Do you have any advice for working around that as it makes most of the books I read... unattractive (chapters bleeding into one another, headers and footers in the middle of pages, etc.) Normally I wouldn't ask, but I'm trying to figure out how to handle the 1500 or so PDF ebooks via automation/batch processing I have and getting them into the right format so I can implement Calibre's metadata since I essentially have to convert them all to epub/lrf.

[kovidgoyal]

Unfortunately no automated process. Maually ou can convert the PDF to HTML and insert page breaks at the appropriate points by hand