Best PDF to LRF conversion

[tech_au]

I usually just read PDFs directly on the reader but when I get a badly formatted one I usually try to convert it to LRF.
Calibre does a pretty hit-and-miss conversion of PDF to LRF so I have found Mobipocket creator converts PDF to html quite well and then calibre does a good job of html to lrf.
Is there any better and easier way to get a good PDF to LRF conversion result ?

[Pablo]

I've found that Mobipocket Creator skips some images (those that are right at the start of a page) when converting pdf files.
I normally use Book Designer, but had problems importing the html files that Mobipocket Creator generates. So what I do is edit the html file with Word, break the external links to images (so that the images are saved inside the document) and after that I import the resulting .doc with BD.
Anyway, not all pdf's are the same. A simple all-text pdf is no problem, as long as there are no special symbols (like greek letters or arrows). When you have images or formulas you have to check carefully the output file for problems.
In some cases it is a best to stick to the pdf format, cropping the borders with a program like soPdf.

[frabjous]

Have you tried any of the following free tools from here at MR?

PDFLRF
Rasterfarian
PDFread
SoPDF
PaperCrop

The first three are all PDF > LRF converters (or allow that at least), and yield good looking results in most cases, though I think they're all image based, so can result in very large file sizes.

SoPDF and PaperCrop are PDF > PDF "converters" that can be used to make a PDF look better on a small screen by, e.g., stripping the margins and/or dividing multi-column PDFs into separate pages. SoPDF isn't image based unless the source is, so I tend to use it if I want to preserve a smaller file size.

If start with a very badly formatted PDF, at present, there's not much that can be done, however, as far as I know. The algorithm in this thread might be worth experimenting with, but it looks rather drastic, and I haven't found the time to try to make it work myself.

[jefferson_frantz]

Originally Posted by tech_au

I usually just read PDFs directly on the reader but when I get a badly formatted one I usually try to convert it to LRF.
Calibre does a pretty hit-and-miss conversion of PDF to LRF so I have found Mobipocket creator converts PDF to html quite well and then calibre does a good job of html to lrf.
Is there any better and easier way to get a good PDF to LRF conversion result ?

First i try to convert the pdf to lrf using BookDesigner. But, in some cases, the conversion is not good, so my next option is to use Mobipocket Creator to pass the pdf to html and then use BookDesigner with the html generated.