Tons of extraneous style application and markup of unwanted elements (line-breaks, crop-marks, etc). However, the HTML that Adobe exported was U G L Y. I decided editing the HTML directly would give me the most precise control over everything. I’d need to create style classes, inspect parts of the text with unique formatting, re-insert images optimized for display in the ebook environment. All of these alternate formats, based on the PDF, would need quite a bit of fine-tuning. This produced a set of files (html, css, and images) fairly similar in display quality to the Calibre conversion, the KDP conversion, and the Word copy/paste. It also included artificial line-breaks (which would interrupt reflowability).įinally, I tried exporting HTML from the PDF using Adobe Acrobat. I also attempted uploading a copy of the PDF to KDP for conversion, an although it impressively removed the crop marks and other repeating page elements, images were again partially left out (partially because some textual elements from images were preserved, like chart text, which was probably an artifact of the Adobe OCR process).Ĭopy/special-pasting directly from the PDF to Word did a decent job of preserving italics and bold text, but also preserved unwanted repeating page elements. The program produced a fairly literal conversion (including crop-marks) but with lots of strange line-breaks and no images (where did they go? I don’t know). I recently converted a book for which I only had the PDF –no InDesign files, nor Word files to port to InDesign.Įven though I knew the Calibre developer discourages conversion from PDF, I took a swing. Layout programs like InDesign offer increasingly sophisticated ebook output options that allow the user to specify reflow-friendly display instructions for elements like these (eg: don’t include page numbers in the epub output, place sidebars at the end of the section and style them differently, etc). Layout-specific elements within PDFs, like sidebars, call-outs, and anything tabular, can also befuddle converters. It’s hard for conversion programs (like Calibre and the converter built into Amazon’s KDP web-based uploader) to recognize and strip away unwanted elements like that. In the case of our most recent conversion, our PDF was fraught with various printers crop-marks, the file name, and creation date on every page. Often, PDFs carry print-specific elements that aren’t useful in the context of reflowable text, like page numbers and repeating chapter titles. Ebook conversion from PDF is possible but problematic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |