PDF conversion problem with quotes.

tadhgadams · 09-19-2010, 01:27 PM

Looking through the forums, I see that PDF conversion is a tricky beast. So thank you for all the work to making it as painless as it is.

The issue I have is I have PDFs that use ‘ and ’ for quote marks which when converted to any other format show up as „ and ” respectively and I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve it.

I tried "Transliterate unicode characters to ASCII" as well as "Smarten Punctuation" without success.

I ran the debug process and the problem occurs in the input plugin. I didn't know if I need to find some way to edit the PDFs prior to putting them into Calibre or if there was a way for me to replace „ with ‘ and ” with ’ before Calibre converts from the html to the mobi/epub or if there's another answer.

carld · 09-19-2010, 01:58 PM

I use Mobipocket Creator to convert PDFs. It imports the PDF and generates an editable HTML file during the conversion. I edit the file in Word and then rebuild the book with Mobipocket, and add it to Calibre. It's a little tedious, but it does work.

ldolse · 09-19-2010, 08:47 PM

This kind of thing just happens with some pdf documents. I think it's a side effect of pdftohtml, which is the engine that Calibre uses to convert pdfs. The new pdf engine may fix some of these cases, but it's not ready yet.

You'll need to use Sigil or a text editor to do a find and replace after conversion. There isn't any feature in Calibre at this point that lets you do search and replace on screwed up quotes.

09-19-2010, 01:27 PM	#1
tadhgadams Member Posts: 18 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2010 Device: Kindle Voyage, iPad mini 4	PDF conversion problem with quotes. Looking through the forums, I see that PDF conversion is a tricky beast. So thank you for all the work to making it as painless as it is. The issue I have is I have PDFs that use ‘ and ’ for quote marks which when converted to any other format show up as „ and ” respectively and I'm trying to figure out the best way to solve it. I tried "Transliterate unicode characters to ASCII" as well as "Smarten Punctuation" without success. I ran the debug process and the problem occurs in the input plugin. I didn't know if I need to find some way to edit the PDFs prior to putting them into Calibre or if there was a way for me to replace „ with ‘ and ” with ’ before Calibre converts from the html to the mobi/epub or if there's another answer.

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09-19-2010, 01:58 PM	#2
carld Wizard Posts: 2,698 Karma: 4748723 Join Date: Dec 2007 Device: Kindle Paperwhite	I use Mobipocket Creator to convert PDFs. It imports the PDF and generates an editable HTML file during the conversion. I edit the file in Word and then rebuild the book with Mobipocket, and add it to Calibre. It's a little tedious, but it does work.

09-19-2010, 08:47 PM	#3
ldolse Wizard Posts: 1,337 Karma: 123455 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Malaysia Device: PRS-650, iPhone	This kind of thing just happens with some pdf documents. I think it's a side effect of pdftohtml, which is the engine that Calibre uses to convert pdfs. The new pdf engine may fix some of these cases, but it's not ready yet. You'll need to use Sigil or a text editor to do a find and replace after conversion. There isn't any feature in Calibre at this point that lets you do search and replace on screwed up quotes.

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