Recommendations for A Good Free Software/Website to convert pdf to EPUB

Question

I find that when I convert a pdf file with a significant amount of text to EPUB format (for eg books), they get broken into paragraphs in between words of the same sentence.I have used - Calibre, Toepub.com and a lot many websites available on The Big-Bad-Web ;-). I have not yet been able to fully grasp Calibre's different features.So, any hacks to fix the conversion within Calibre are also really appreciated.

My basic problem is that the text gets distorted. Paragraphs are formed where even the ongoing sentence hasn't even completed.HOW to Avoid this ?

Answer 1

SmallPdf and PDFEscape are applications and online services to edit and convert PDF to other formats, such as MS Word .docx. From these document files, Calibre does well converting to EPUB and other formats. Of course, using online tools exposes documents to others.

N.B. The difficulty is that PDF creates a description of the page appearance, with hard line breaks, hard hyphenation, etc. In some cases, only the image of the page is left, with no text at all! To transform this page image back to flowing text requires an application that recognizes spelling, line-break hyphenation, paragraph structure and so forth, and in the worst case, optical character recognition (OCR). Most PDF-to-document converters do not do it well. It's easy to go from almost any document format to PDF, but the reverse is non-trivial.

You might also try converting the PDF to an image (e.g. JPEG) and using online OCR such as OnlineOCR or SODA PDF, or an OCR application such as Tesseract-based FreeOCR to render that into a document.

In almost all PDF conversions, the document created will require editing for content and format.