Reflowing PDF

[arivero]

Some free utilities:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/

http://www.nzdl.org/html/prescript.html (python-based)

pstotext

ps2ascii

ps2html

ps2a.sh

I wonder, could mobilereaders tell about its experiences with these packages? Quality and Speed considerations are important, because it seems that some people wants a reflow package in their own ereader, not in the PC.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by arivero

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml/

I wonder, could mobilereaders tell about its experiences with these packages? Quality and Speed considerations are important, because it seems that some people wants a reflow package in their own ereader, not in the PC.

pdftohtml doesn't really do a good job. The tests that I did resulted in a file that required lots of editing to reflow the text - and more to make it pleasant to read.

XPDF's pdftotext did a better job on the tagged PDFs I created, but editing was still needed. On regular PDFs, it did just as good (or, bad) a job as pdftohtml.

Knowing the nature of PDFs, don't think that you will ever find a utility that will let you reflow a PDF or convert a PDF into something else. PDF was designed to prevent both.

Now, when I see support for tagged PDFs, I might change my belief, but until then, PDFs remain a "page layout" format - not an eBook format.