I’ve done It before. It’s just highly dependent on the PDF. What software made the pdf? What format was it in prior to being a PDF? Is it a scanned image of text? Or does it have actual text.
Another option, that might work better, might not, though it would be more work, is use something like Microsoft Word first. Word can open a PDF and “convert” it to Word format. After that, you spend a lot of time fixing all the formatting which will probably be fucked up.
And then, once you have a nice clean Word doc, convert that to epub.
I’ve had some trouble with PDFs that were just images of pages of text (easy way to tell, assuming you’re on linux, is run pdftotext on it and see if you get anything). There’s a utility called pdfsandwich that will use Tesseract to OCR the images and add text to the PDF.
I just checked and tested it, works for me. Is there anything unusual about the PDF?
I’ve done It before. It’s just highly dependent on the PDF. What software made the pdf? What format was it in prior to being a PDF? Is it a scanned image of text? Or does it have actual text.
Another option, that might work better, might not, though it would be more work, is use something like Microsoft Word first. Word can open a PDF and “convert” it to Word format. After that, you spend a lot of time fixing all the formatting which will probably be fucked up.
And then, once you have a nice clean Word doc, convert that to epub.
I’ve had some trouble with PDFs that were just images of pages of text (easy way to tell, assuming you’re on linux, is run
pdftotexton it and see if you get anything). There’s a utility calledpdfsandwichthat will use Tesseract to OCR the images and add text to the PDF.That might help too.
Thx crude scans are the only way you can get a lot of the more fringe books on https://annas-archive.li/ etc.