Mac specific calibre issue

[kitae]

I'm attempting to convert some PDFs to epub on my mac. I noticed that quotation marks were being dropped during the process.

I found this thread, but it didn't seem to fix the issue:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86570

On a lark I decided to try converting the book on a Windows PC, and oddly it converted correctly including quotation marks.

Both versions of calibre were the same. In both cases I tried a default convert from PDF to Epub.

For various reasons, I would much prefer to use my mac to manage my ebooks and do conversions. I'd appreciate any help or suggestions as to how I could resolve this issue. Thanks!

[toddos]

Perhaps it's a font issue on the Mac? You could turn on debugging output for the conversion and inspect the intermediate HTML files to see if they're stripping the quotation marks or if they're being rendered as a non-standard quote character. If the latter, you could fix them in the HTML (global search & replace) and then reconvert to that. I had a similar issue with "soft hyphen" characters when converting from PDF (on Windows) that I fixed by replacing the soft hyphens with standard - characters in the intermediate HTML.

It helps if you have a text editor that will show you the character codes. I like PSPad on Windows, not sure about Mac.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kitae

In both cases I tried a default convert from PDF to Epub.

Just a thought: Are you sure you used default in both cases? Calibre remembers previous convert settings for a book, so if you had tried something on the Mac, but not on the PC, the settings might well have been different.