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.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
49 points (93.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35694 readers
1098 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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 they want. But it’ll probably drive the cost way up- especially if it was automated (and it probably was/is)
@ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de when you try to read a pdf on a smaller e-ink reader, everything is reduced and almost ineligible. You want to preserve the main features (boxes, italics) but being able to have a fluid format
@alvaro@social.graves.cl Well, that’s what I figured. You technically can preserve formatting on EPUB but why would you? It's not what the format is for, and most readers can support either. If yours doesn't, look for apps or a software update.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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).
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 !
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.