Pdf to Epub conversion - Newby

[zambosky]

Greeting to everyone. I'm Sergio from Italy.
Todays is my fist day with Caliber and my fiest e-book reader : Bebook One 2010 edition.
I have a simple question, as for now : if i convert a .pdf file to .epub no problem, i did it, quite simple.
Problem : if I use the zoom function, a simple x2, the text doesn't reflow ( same problem with the original .pdf) it is bigger BUT there ise a carriage return after the final word of each line ..., example :

Original : aaaaa bbbbb cccc

X2 : aaaa bbbb

cccc

Please can you tell me how to set Calibre to avoid thi problem ?

Best regards and thanks in advance.

[kiwikobo]

Conversion of PDF to Epub is very flaky, and I think it would pay to remember that Calibre is showing at version 0.7, very much pre-beta. The fact that it works at all is a great benefit!

While we're waiting for conversions that hold up some of the formatting, manually editing (or rather, wholesale replacement) of the stylesheet is needed. But I think you're referring to the common problem Calibre has with taking PDF files that have hard line-breaks and creating an output Epub file where every line is its own paragraph. Very annoying.

One solution I use is to use Calibre to convert the PDF into an RTF file, then edit this RTF and remove the hard line-breaks. If you are comfortable with regular expressions this isn't too hard, but even in Word it's possible (you're trying to replace every paragraph starting with a lower-case letter with a space, so do Edit/Replace then change every instance of "^p^ta" with " a" (note the space) selecting "Match Case". Do the same with "^p^tb" to " b" and so on through to "^p^tz" with " z". Now remove all multiple spaces (replace "[space][space]" with "[space]"), do any other fiddling you wish to do (e.g. removing tabs or whatever), and save the document.

Go back into Calibre and convert the RTF file into an ePub and it should be a lot closer. It sounds a pain but only takes a couple of minutes. With a regular expression editor it's even quicker.


Charles

[toddos]

Alternatively, you can play with Calibre's line unwrapping factor until you find a value that works for your specific input. I've found 0.50 works with many PDFs I've converted, but not all. As of right now, trial and error is really your only option.

Alternatively alternatively, turn on Calibre's debugging mode when you do the conversion. This will save all of the intermediate conversions in the folder you choose (PDF to raw HTML with <br /> line breaks, raw HTML to cleaned up HTML after attempting to unwrap lines and replace <br />s with proper <p />s, etc). You can then clean up the HTML directly and reconvert starting from HTML rather than PDF. Also useful for playing with header/footer regex generation if the default isn't working on your input.

[zambosky]

Ok, thank you very much for useful informations, i will try one file at a time as suggested, trying to achieve the best result...
Greetings

Sergio

[neilmarr]

Best of luck, Sergio. Good to have your company. Cheers. Neil

[GeoffC]

Welcome Sergio , you will get there with trial and error ....

Welcome too, to Charles and toddos