best way to convert PDF to ePUB - what do you think?

[Pushka]

Originally Posted by vastav

Thanks for your kind words. If you were using the ePub tool, one thing I can think of is that the bounding rect wasn't big enough to fully encompass the page number, for the plugin to exclude it from conversion. I'd be happy to look at your PDF and provide you exact suggestion. You can email that to support at pdf2epub dot com or upload on this thread, if it is public domain.

You are welcome. I hope lots of people get on to it. One thing that will limit the usage is the high cost of Acrobat though.

Do I need to do this boundary marking for every page number that appears? I only did it for the first one.

I do have PDF edit, but I have to edit every page.

[hidari]

Originally Posted by Pushka

You are welcome. I hope lots of people get on to it. One thing that will limit the usage is the high cost of Acrobat though.

Do I need to do this boundary marking for every page number that appears? I only did it for the first one.

I do have PDF edit, but I have to edit every page.

ALSO, consider PDF transformer: http://pdftransformer.abbyy.com/


It is a standalone program from ABBYY....I use it often. It will OCR and transfer files from PDF-> Searchable PDF, RTF, HTML or TXT. Then you can use Calibre to transfer it to epub.

It cost about 100 USD but is much cheaper than Adobe if you are only looking for a PDF converter....

[vastav]

Originally Posted by Pushka

You are welcome. I hope lots of people get on to it. One thing that will limit the usage is the high cost of Acrobat though.

Do I need to do this boundary marking for every page number that appears? I only did it for the first one.

I do have PDF edit, but I have to edit every page.

If you selected the 'set area as background on All Pages' option using ePub tool, you do not need to edit every page. However, since the first few pages are usually different than the rest of the pages, I would recommend repeating this for some content pages beyond cover in your document.

For people who do not have Acrobat, I do have an online conversion option on my site. However, this option misses the artifacts elimination step.

[Pushka]

Originally Posted by vastav

If you selected the 'set area as background on All Pages' option using ePub tool, you do not need to edit every page. However, since the first few pages are usually different than the rest of the pages,

Cant seem to find the option to do that? The thing I am trying to remove appears at the top of every page, so once I can do a generic delete, that will work for me!


Ah, I found it. I was using the Advanced Text tool but I see I can do this straight after the tagging process, which gives me a different type of edit tool, and a right click and was ableto set background to all pages! LEGEND!

Dammit, cant give you any more Karma just yet vastav til I spread the lurv!

[vastav]

Originally Posted by Pushka

Cant seem to find the option to do that? The thing I am trying to remove appears at the top of every page, so once I can do a generic delete, that will work for me!


Ah, I found it. I was using the Advanced Text tool but I see I can do this straight after the tagging process, which gives me a different type of edit tool, and a right click and was ableto set background to all pages! LEGEND!

Dammit, cant give you any more Karma just yet vastav til I spread the lurv!

Glad that you found the option. Thanks again for your encouragement. Here is some documentation that may be helpful in general - http://www.pdf2epub.com/help#conversion

[Pushka]

Now it is perfect!

[vastav]

Originally Posted by PatNY

vastav, I originally did use that website. I tried it again last evening and it still resulted in a file with the paragraphs all run together. OK, so then I downloaded and installed the plugin into Acrobat 9 and the issue with the run-in paragraphs is still there.

The paragraphs in this pdf may not be formatted in a standard way, but when I do an intermediate conversion to RTF or HTML in Acrobat, they are all picked up correctly!

You can see for yourself as I am going to send you the ebook file by email so you can investigate what is going on with your methods.

--Pat

The PDF file had tagging issues - entire chapter was marked as a single paragraph which resulted into the problem described above. Simply deleting the tags from the PDF and letting the ePub converter regenerate tags fixed the issue in ePub conversion.

[Dark123]

The best way I have found is to make sure the ePub output file size is over 10mb, and then convert it from PDF to ePub, and then use the CSS and the 1 HTML file to edit wherever it needs editing (Make sure to remove header and footer). Use Notepad++ to edit out whatever is extra, like some header not being removed, or something should be capital etc.
You will need to learn how the stylesheet.css works and some CSS tags (It's not hard). Then use that HTML with the CSS and convert that to ePub again.
This is the best FREE way I know.
I think Adobe Acrobat can convert PDF to HTML really well, but you will need to pay for it.

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by vastav

The PDF file had tagging issues - entire chapter was marked as a single paragraph which resulted into the problem described above. Simply deleting the tags from the PDF and letting the ePub converter regenerate tags fixed the issue in ePub conversion.

Just want to reiterate that first deleting the tags in the PDF document fixed the issue entirely with the pdf2epub conversion. Acrobat can re-generate tags automatically.

A big thank you to vastav for his assistance in solving the issue. He is extremely helpful, courteous, informative, and responsive.

I have to say now that Acrobat + pdf2epub seems to me to be the ideal solution for converting PDFs to epubs at the moment. It’s the quickest, easiest, most flexible and accurate way to do it. First off, pdf2epub can read bookmarks in a PDF ebook to create an accurate and workable metadata TOC. Many PDFs already contain bookmarks but if they don’t, Acrobat lets you automatically create them with one-click from its tags. And if the PDF doesn’t have existing tags you can have Acrobat scan the document to automatically create them too. This doesn’t work for all pdf ebooks. I have one that is so garbled in terms of structure that the auto-generated tags and bookmarks are useless (garbage in, garbage out). But most pdf ebooks I have looked at are pretty clean and usable for auto-generating bookmarks (if they don’t already have them). Second, in the worst case scenario, where you have to manually create bookmarks, Acrobat’s bookmark system is pretty easy to use. I found it much easier and faster to mark sections/chapters this way than in Sigil.

The biggest problem for me with all the other conversion methods I tried was the inaccurate paragraphs breaks. The Acrobat + pdf2epub solution not only is best at producing accurate breaks, but is the easiest way to get a workable metadata TOC at the same time.

Unfortunately Acrobat does cost a lot, but as I mentioned, one might be able to get an older lower-cost copy off of eBay. Or maybe you know someone who has an older copy to spare. If you can’t get it, you can at least go to the pdf2epub website and use their online converter to run your PDFs through. This would at least give you the benefit of accurate paragraph conversions and a workable TOC (if bookmarks already exist). To see if your pdf is already bookmarked, you can open it up in the free Adobe Reader and go to View>Navigation Panels>Bookmarks. You won’t be able to edit bookmarks with the free reader, but it will at least show you if they exist.

[AgiZ]

So in short, what did you guys find as the best way to convert PDFs into some ebook compatible format apart from the expencive Adobe Acrobat conversion?

Thx.

[Agama]

Originally Posted by easyrider

I found today a good way to convert PDF to ePUB
It's in 3 steps:

1. mobipocket creator: PDF -> html
2. mobipocket creator: html -> PRC
3. Calibre PRC -> ePub

Thank-you easyrider, this is very helpful. I hadn't come across Mobipocket Creator but it works really well. I take the html output from step 1 and manually edit it to match the conventions that I use for all e-books so that I can link in my standard style sheet. Then calibre works it magic and I have an excellent ePub version of the pdf in a much shorter time span than by using my previous methods.

[SCBrazil]

Hi,
I'm new to the forum. I live in Brazil and have never even seen an ereader. They are very expensive over here ($600 for Cool-er, $900 for PRS 600) but I have decided to invest in one as I have many textbooks for my profession in PDF but cannot read them on my PC.
Using this method of conversion, will I be able to satisfactorily read my books after conversion on either of these units? I don't mind spending time re-formatting manually to correct wrong line breaks.

[Agama]

My experience with PDF to ePub is that the result is very good for text based books, e.g. small format paperback novels, but not so good for PDFs that contain a lot of diagrams or a large page size with complex layouts, (a 6-inch screen cannot compete with an A4 textbook). Many readers have PDF capability built in so, before investing a significant sum of money, I would try to get a hands-on with one if you can and see if your text books display well.

[SCBrazil]

Originally Posted by Agama

My experience with PDF to ePub is that the result is very good for text based books, e.g. small format paperback novels, but not so good for PDFs that contain a lot of diagrams or a large page size with complex layouts, (a 6-inch screen cannot compete with an A4 textbook). Many readers have PDF capability built in so, before investing a significant sum of money, I would try to get a hands-on with one if you can and see if your text books display well.

They are psychology textbooks and are mostly text only. There are some tables to show statistics but not many so I guess I should be okay.
Thanks very much for your help.

[AgiZ]

Indeed the conversion described above worked very well! Thank you.
1. Mobipocket Creator - PDF to html
2. Calibre - html to epub

About this:

Originally Posted by SCBrazil

Hi,
...They are very expensive over here ($600 for Cool-er, $900 for PRS 600).

Why not buy some cheaper device like Kindle or something like that? That works just as well, no?