Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨alvaro@social.graves.cl⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

Calibre and online sites can convert from PDF to Epub usually lose most of the format. I tried PDFElements, with similarly poor results.

Is there any service/app that actually works and converts a PDF to Epub in a way that resembles closely the original?

cc @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

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ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I thought that was the point? PDF usually stores the position of every letter so that pages appear the same when printed, but it is wasteful and does not scale between screen sizes. So EPUB stores just formatted text, which can be rendered at any font size or screen width.

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- FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You can have fixed content as well, but it needs to be flagged in the document- for example, for illustrated books, or cover, title, and cpr pages.
  
  Op needs to talk with whoever is doing the conversion and tell them what he wants,
  
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un_aristocrate@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Pdf is usually just an image with Metadata so that you can search and copy text, basically the coordinates of every letters and words in the image.

The formatting is only visible in the image so it’s very hard to recover.

The goal of pdf is to create a file that will look exactly the same every times but it is not ment to be edited or modified in anyway.

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mambabasa@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Use MS Word to convert PDF to DOCX then use Word to convert to EPUB. This method will still result in lossy conversion. This is inevitable.

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Praxinoscope@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Maybe try converting the PDF to another file type, such as Mobi, first and then epub?

Not sure if that’d help but it’s worth a shot.

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- FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It won’t. EPUB as a format defaults to being a reflowable document, if you have fixed content, it needs to be defined and flagged as such.
  
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alvaro@social.graves.cl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
@nostupidquestions@lemmy.world For posterity, I found that https://github.com/pdf2htmlEX/pdf2htmlEX does an excellent job converting to HTML (although the file size increases a lot).
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filcuk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The official Adobe online converter always gave me the best results, I used it for invoices with tables and odd formatting all over. They have limits on free, but it should handle a small book. Not direct to epub, however.

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Sequence5666@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I had a same issue for my kindle. What I realized what the source pdf should be good. For example I used to use 1-2mb pdf size for conversion, but it used to break in text or alignment. Now I pick 10+ mb sized pdf instead. Essentially people who make heavy weight PDF files save it as full adaptable file size without reducing its qualities.

Hope this works !

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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Really, there isn’t anything. As others have said, it’s a limitation of the format. Best you can usually do is convert to a word processing file and redo the formatting manually (assuming you know what that formatting was). It’s a pain in the ass if you’re trying to improve pdfs of old, out of print stuff. If it’s your own files and you just lost the original word processing files, it isn’t as bad because at least you have memory to work from.

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