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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?
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
Others are recommending Calibre which I'll try, even though I share your pessimism. Have you ever tried it?
Yes I tried it and did not get any usable results.
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.
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.
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).