Keep Pagination Schema when Converting Epub to PDF

[TheLinguist]

Hello,

First, I would like to clarify that I'll try to follow as much as possible the guidelines of How to Ask Question About Conversion Problems, even though most of them does not seem applicable (as this is more of a general question than a problem per se).

I have an ePub file, which is copyrighted so I can't share the file, but I will try to describe its structure as best as possible to characterize the file. The ePub is composed of a xhtml for each page in the book. For instance, the contents of page 1 is contained within a file page_1.xhtml and so forth. I don't think this file is suited for any specific device, as far as I know, for me it looks like they tried to represent it the closest possible to the print book format. The file has a kind of "manual" pagination on each page file.

I think the log files wouldn't be relevant at this time, as I'm still stuck in the "how do I do this" stage of the conversion. I couldn't find myself a specific recommendation for this in the docs, and when I tried the standard options the outcomes was disastrous.

The problem is that some source pages (xhtml files in my ePub) does not seem to fit the destination document pages. Several pages from the original document get into multiple pages in the PDF, generating a huge number of almost blank pages.

For that reason, I would like to ask whether there is an option to make each file be mapped to a certain page, preserving the original page numbers and reducing the font size or something like that to make it fit a single page. For printing and organization, it would be much easier if there was a correspondence with the original pagination.

If perhaps the software does not have an option for that, is there any workaround I could do to obtain that result? I'm not afraid of some hard work, if necessary.

Sincerely,
TheLinguist

[jhowell]

That sounds like a fixed-layout EPUB. That is a format that calibre does not currently support.

[BetterRed]

If you want to have someone assess the epub you could use the ScrambleEbook plugin. See Index of plugins

BR

[retiredbiker]

I'm not afraid of some hard work, if necessary.

Since you say that, here's what I'd do, if I wanted the pdf badly enough. Open the book in the editor. Select all those page files (hundreds?). Then right-click on the selected set of files and do "Merge selected text files". That will give you one big xhtml file. If there is a separate style sheet, copy the contents into the header inside <style> tags as usual. Export it. Open that in Libre Office Writer and save it as an odt. Then edit page-breaks and what have you to your heart's content, then export it as a pdf.

If you're a Word person, I'm sure you could do something similar, but I haven't touched Word in 10 years. (I know it works in Writer, since I've done basically the same thing on various books, for different reasons.) And maybe, just maybe, simply converting it to docx would work well enough to save all the other steps.