A PDF that has been impossible to convert to EPUB

[FacetiousKnave]

I have a strange situation with a PDF.

Let me start by clarifying that this is not a scanned document. I purchased it from Degruyter [dot] com. It was originally created with Adobe Acrobat, so the text is crisp, straight, and clear.

I want to convert this PDF to EPUB in order to read it on my Kindle.

The problem is that when you select and copy a paragraph, you can see that the selection automatically includes an invisible index in the margin. When you then paste the text into a Word document, the content is completely broken and has a long column full of numbers.

I already know that it is quite difficult to keep the format when converting a PDF, but this particular document has been a challenge.

I have tried to convert it to DOCX with Calibre, multi online PDF converter and even the Adobe official PDF converter. I also tried an OCR converter to no avail. In the end, the formatting is so broken that the text is unreadable.

The weirdest part is that when I convert it from PDF to PDF with Calibre, the resulting PDF also breaks.

It seems that the PDF must have some kind of script protecting it.

Does anybody have any alternative? Ideas?

[kovidgoyal]

Converting PDF to PDF has all the same limitations as converting PDF to anything else, since al conversions work by going through an intermediate HTML representation.