Your best PDF to epub or text software methods?

I saw this other guy asking how you'd download protected drive only view documents. So that reminded me of that other annoying characteristic of PDFs. They're 'protected'.

How do you deal with PDFs that are inherently uncustomisable and have fixed formatting? I appreciate the KO Reader and other readers can do reflowable text, but I'd prefer not to and epubs/txt/any customisable format would be better.

Any good methods of PDF to text/epub out there?

12 comments

Yeah, PDFs frequently make each line, word or sometimes letter its own textbox to ensure consistency when rendering. Did you try the open source ebook manager Calibre for desktop or Librera Reader for Android?

Also, utilities like qpdf can remove a PDF password (provided you know it of course – though you can guess with quick, unlimited retries).

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Calibre is the way to go. It’ll convert quite happily to epub, html, whatever. I just converted the Linux From Scratch book pdf in to epub and mobi for my kindle.

If you just need to edit a pdf and change some formatting on a line, try LibreOffice Draw!

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Yet another plug for Calibre. Best I've found for customizing and troubleshooting PDF conversions.

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No easy ones I know of. Have done it but it was a pain.

Crop the pages so that headers, footnotes and page numbers arent part of the book anymore. Use Briss for that.

Convert to html, not sure which is the best software though

Clean up manually. That is the most work, mostly newlines and stuff. Dont even try without Regex.

I dont bother anymore, for smaller pages I do the cropping and read on kindle. Larger on tablet.

Have a look at this forum for more in depth knowledge: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=184
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- Others are recommending Calibre which I'll try, even though I share your pessimism. Have you ever tried it?
  
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  Yes I tried it and did not get any usable results.
  
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  Yes I tried it and did not get any usable results.
  
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If you have one of those really annoying PDFs where the structure is all crazy or some letters are pictures, etc., it is possible to OCR them with a mask on page numbers.

There are also tools which can just extract the text elements and smush them together, but as others have said, this doesn't always works as intended.

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