this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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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?

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[–] Historical_General@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Others are recommending Calibre which I'll try, even though I share your pessimism. Have you ever tried it?

[–] kniescherz@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes I tried it and did not get any usable results.

[–] Historical_General@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In his own words lol:

To re-iterate PDF is a really, really bad format to use as input. If you absolutely must use PDF, then be prepared for an output ranging anywhere from decent to unusable, depending on the input PDF.

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html

[–] kniescherz@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Wow who downvotes you?

That quote is pretty spot on. I feel that there might be well formated and simple pdfs which could be formatted but as soon as it gets busier or the pdf isnt well structured behind the scenes it gets messy.