PDF to .mobi - Problems with Conversion

llcooljayce · 09-04-2010, 04:19 PM

Hey guys, I have Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' in PDF and I want to read it on my Kindle 3. I have tried sending it directly as a PDF but the font was too small. I tried converting it to a .mobi using Calibre but some words were missing or garbled ... does anyone have any suggestions on perhaps another format to try? Thanks

llcooljayce · 09-05-2010, 10:53 AM

Anyone?

ldolse · 09-05-2010, 11:08 AM

You shouldn't have missing or garbled words unless the original was messed up. The main problem with pdf is you lose some formatting and you'll see the occasional hard line break.

If there are accented characters this may give you the impression some text was garbled - use the 'Keep Ligatures' option under look and feel to fix that.

Edit - Your pdf might be images with OCR underneath that. That would cause you to think the pdf was good, but it's only because you can't see the bad OCR underneath, which is what Calibre would use. Find some of the garbled text in Calibre, then go and copy the same text from the pdf, and copy/paste it into a text editor. If the text editor mirrors Calibre then you can be sure that's the problem.

Starson17 · 09-05-2010, 12:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ldolse

Find some of the garbled text in Calibre, then go and copy the same text from the pdf, and copy/paste it into a text editor. If the text editor mirrors Calibre then you can be sure that's the problem.

This procedure also works:

Find some of the garbled text in Calibre.
Go to the pdf and search for that text.
If you find something in the pdf (even if the text you find looks not-garbled), then you can be sure that's the problem. (PDF searches search for the OCR text, but show you an image of the text.)

adeling · 09-05-2010, 06:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by llcooljayce

Hey guys, I have Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' in PDF and I want to read it on my Kindle 3. I have tried sending it directly as a PDF but the font was too small. I tried converting it to a .mobi using Calibre but some words were missing or garbled ... does anyone have any suggestions on perhaps another format to try? Thanks

When you say some of the words were garbled, was it really only some? The reason I ask is because I did some conversion and all the words were messed up except on the 'cover'. See this page for more information: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/under...rotection.html

llcooljayce · 09-06-2010, 12:52 AM

Looks like what is happening is that Calibre is taking the top of each page and OCR'ing it. For example the first chapter's title is 'The Statue That Didn't Look Right' and it has larger spacing than normal text so it shows up as 'T h e S t a t u e t h a t d i d n ' t l o o k r i g h t'

Which is why i thought other text was garbled. It also has the title of the book over and over again ...

Is there any way to ignore that stuff when converting?

ldolse · 09-06-2010, 01:38 AM

Calibre didn't do any OCR. This is a relatively common problem with conversion of pdf titles - the original PDF had extra spacing between the letters for formatting - not proper full spaces, but they are each basically separate draw instructions in the PDF, so they get converted as separate characters instead of a word. There is no easy way to get rid of those except by hand editing afterward.

As far as the title of the book appearing goes, that's because the PDF has a header or footer that's being converted as well. You can use the header/footer removal option in Structure detection to remove this. You need to write a regular expression pattern for this, it's probably something like "\s*<p>\s*Blink\s*</p>", but you'll need to use the test function to tweak the pattern.

llcooljayce · 09-06-2010, 01:35 PM

I just tried the 'Remove Header' and 'Remove Footer' preference and it worked like a charm! Thanks for the suggestion.

09-04-2010, 04:19 PM	#1
llcooljayce Member Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: Kindle 3	PDF to .mobi - Problems with Conversion Hey guys, I have Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' in PDF and I want to read it on my Kindle 3. I have tried sending it directly as a PDF but the font was too small. I tried converting it to a .mobi using Calibre but some words were missing or garbled ... does anyone have any suggestions on perhaps another format to try? Thanks

09-05-2010, 11:08 AM	#3
ldolse Wizard Posts: 1,337 Karma: 123455 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Malaysia Device: PRS-650, iPhone	You shouldn't have missing or garbled words unless the original was messed up. The main problem with pdf is you lose some formatting and you'll see the occasional hard line break. If there are accented characters this may give you the impression some text was garbled - use the 'Keep Ligatures' option under look and feel to fix that. Edit - Your pdf might be images with OCR underneath that. That would cause you to think the pdf was good, but it's only because you can't see the bad OCR underneath, which is what Calibre would use. Find some of the garbled text in Calibre, then go and copy the same text from the pdf, and copy/paste it into a text editor. If the text editor mirrors Calibre then you can be sure that's the problem. Last edited by ldolse; 09-05-2010 at 11:21 AM.

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09-05-2010, 10:53 AM	#2
llcooljayce Member Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: Kindle 3	Anyone?

09-06-2010, 12:52 AM	#6
llcooljayce Member Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: Kindle 3	Looks like what is happening is that Calibre is taking the top of each page and OCR'ing it. For example the first chapter's title is 'The Statue That Didn't Look Right' and it has larger spacing than normal text so it shows up as 'T h e S t a t u e t h a t d i d n ' t l o o k r i g h t' Which is why i thought other text was garbled. It also has the title of the book over and over again ... Is there any way to ignore that stuff when converting?

09-06-2010, 01:38 AM	#7
ldolse Wizard Posts: 1,337 Karma: 123455 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Malaysia Device: PRS-650, iPhone	Calibre didn't do any OCR. This is a relatively common problem with conversion of pdf titles - the original PDF had extra spacing between the letters for formatting - not proper full spaces, but they are each basically separate draw instructions in the PDF, so they get converted as separate characters instead of a word. There is no easy way to get rid of those except by hand editing afterward. As far as the title of the book appearing goes, that's because the PDF has a header or footer that's being converted as well. You can use the header/footer removal option in Structure detection to remove this. You need to write a regular expression pattern for this, it's probably something like "\s<p>\sBlink\s*</p>", but you'll need to use the test function to tweak the pattern.

09-06-2010, 01:35 PM	#8
llcooljayce Member Posts: 10 Karma: 10 Join Date: Sep 2010 Device: Kindle 3	I just tried the 'Remove Header' and 'Remove Footer' preference and it worked like a charm! Thanks for the suggestion.

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