Conversion Issues in Nook

[_Rodrigo_]

Hi, everybody!

First of all, I wish to thanks for this amazing software!! It has a stupendous quality, full of features and highly customizable! I've been reading ebooks since 2005 and never saw something so good!

Recently, I bought a nook for me and start trying to convert some old pdfs I have. I tried nook built-in pdf adapter, but it is not working very well.

So, I am using Calibre to convert them to EPUB. Unfortunately, with some books, some letters were exchanged for others, much like OCR sometimes does. For example, the word find once become fmd (that is, IN became a M). In others, words are separated or joined.

Although this is a very minor issue, sometimes is a problematic one for me, because, as you may have guessed by my poor English skills, I am not a native speaker and sometimes I cannot guess the original word. Worse yet, I like to read sci-fi and fantasy, two genres in which strange words are a certainty! I have already saw several new ways to write the word illithid

Besides this question, sometimes the converted document has spaces and paragraphs added or subracted.

All this preambule is to kindly ask you if is there any thing I can do to help improve the quality of the pdfs I input to Caliber.

Until now, I am using a case-by-case approach, sometimes first converting the PDF to a simple txt file or a html one, but, besides been a lengthy process, it isn't a universal one.

Has someone any advices for me? Guides, advices and the like are welcome! I read the Nook documentation, FAQ included, but I could not help me through them. If I am missing something in the official documentation, please point it to me

Kind regards,

Rodrigo

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by _Rodrigo_

So, I am using Calibre to convert them to EPUB. Unfortunately, with some books, some letters were exchanged for others, much like OCR sometimes does.

Calibre doesn't do OCR. If you have a pdf that has a word in it like "find" and you convert it, then see the word "fmd," then the word "fmd" was in the original pdf. What happened is this: The original pdf was a scanned image. Someone later ran the pdf through an OCR. Adobe Acrobat has that capability. When you read the book as a pdf, you saw the scanned image and the words looked correct. If you had searched for the word, however, you would not have been able to locate the word "find," only the word "fmd." When Calibre converts, it uses the OCR words, not the images.

All this preambule is to kindly ask you if is there any thing I can do to help improve the quality of the pdfs I input to Caliber.

You need a better OCR on the images, or you need to proof them first.

[JSWolf]

The problem is that converting PDFs is not possible to be done without errors. PDF is not a text format. So when you convert, expect errors. There are no programs out there that will do a perfect conversion. Even Adobe Acrobat cannot convert without errors. Calibre is no different.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is that converting PDFs is not possible to be done without errors. PDF is not a text format. So when you convert, expect errors. There are no programs out there that will do a perfect conversion. Even Adobe Acrobat cannot convert without errors. Calibre is no different.

Just to be clear - Calibre is different in that it can't do OCR, while Acrobat can. His pdf book had been previously run through an OCR conversion. There are lots of pdf books out there that are scanned images of pages only, Other books are like his - they have images of the page and hidden OCR text that can be searched. The latter can be converted by Calibre, but it's terrible.