PDF to AZW3 Please... pretty please?

[jimbobleeharry]

Hi all, can someone please tell me a program that can convert PDF to AZW3 or something I can read on a Kindle and make use of the vocabulary builder?

I am a teacher and inherited a plethora of PDF's in my time served, but find them to strenuous to read on a bright screen.

I have tried emailing them to my Kindle email address and using Calibre with all the plugins recommended.

The text I end up receiving is full of linebreak errors, random letter spamming
g
g
g
g
g
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and completely missing tables/ diagrams.

Please help if you can, paying for the program is not an issue if it makes textbooks accessible on my Kindle.

P.S. I know PDF's are not for Ebook reading and a pain in the bum to covert - I still want it!

[pdurrant]

Unfortunately, there's no good automated way, as PDFs are mostly just characters positioned on a page, with no sense of flow.

Perhaps your best bet would be trying an OCR program on them, as if they were hard copy scanned in.

[Tarana]

I have novels scanned and then converted to pdf to epub and then Calibre from epub to azw3. I use the program ABBYY Transformer for these conversions and it works very well (about $40). The thing is, I'm not dealing with DRM or tables, so I don't know how well it will work for your purposes. It won't convert something with DRM. I don't know how well it handles tables.

[willus]

You'll get a lot of people telling you PDF is a horrible format to try and convert to an e-book, and they're mostly right, but...

If you want the PDF to fit better on your kindle screen you might try k2pdfopt. It is not always great with classroom-style text books, but it's worth a try. There are videos that show you how to get started in the help pages.

If that doesn't work for you, try my PDF conversion tips page.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by jimbobleeharry

Hi all, can someone please tell me a program that can convert PDF to AZW3 or something I can read on a Kindle and make use of the vocabulary builder?

I am a teacher and inherited a plethora of PDF's in my time served, but find them to strenuous to read on a bright screen.

I have tried emailing them to my Kindle email address and using Calibre with all the plugins recommended.

The text I end up receiving is full of linebreak errors, random letter spamming
g
g
g
g
g
g

and completely missing tables/ diagrams.

Please help if you can, paying for the program is not an issue if it makes textbooks accessible on my Kindle.

P.S. I know PDF's are not for Ebook reading and a pain in the bum to covert - I still want it!

As the others have said, what you see from the Kindle IS what comes out of automated PDF-2-eBook/HTML conversion. There's nothing unique about the horribleness of it.

You can DIY in various ways. You can try

• copy-paste into Word, turn on the invisible formatting codes, manually fix all of that, and then convert the Word file;
• Export the PDF to Word, using Adobe Acrobat and then, turn on the invisible formatting codes, manually fix all of that, and then convert the Word file;
• You can use AbbyyFineReader, or another OCR program, run it, fix the red words/phrases and when that's done, save the Word file. Then, turn on the invisible formatting codes, manually fix all of that, and then convert the Word file;

Or, any combination of these, or any other "magic" conversion method, but do you see how all of them end, once you have the file in text format? That's the reality. There's no shortcut. Believe me, every formatted on the planet wishes that there were one, but there isn't.

Sorry. Perhaps it would be easier to just buy the books in MOBI format in the first place, if they are available?

Hitch