Dealing with pdf and ePub using calibre

I am currently starting with a Project, that deals with the ePub Format. I just thought, that it might be a good start to create a basic tool chain to create ePub Files from given Documents.

The de-facto Document Format is still PDF so i started with a Document in this Format. To make sure i deal with a CC Document i used a Document. created by my own: my ancient Diploma Thesis (there is only a german version :-/). The PDF is around 3.5 MBs in size.

If you work with different eBook Formats and different eBook Readers, you should definitely have a look at  calibre it is a all-in-one eBook Solution. It handles PDF and ePub Files and – more important – can convert PDF into ePub Files. The Resulting ePub File of my Diploma Thesis is available for Download here – Hope it looks better than on my iPhone using Stanza ;-).

As you can see, there is still some need to enhance the result of the conversion, but the result produced by the calibre converter is quite good and readable. There is a big problem with the headers and footers (e.g. page numbers), but for a automatically, free process, i can deal with it.

There might be some PDFs that calibre cannot process. I could solve this problem by “reprinting” the PDF with the MacOs PDF export. The calibre could also convert these PDF files.

Another cool thing i found today, is the conversation of PDFs into image files using the ImageMagick convert tool. There is a good Blog post at medicalnerds.com.

You need just a few steps.

First make sure, that you have a version of ImageMagick installed on your system:

    sudo port install ImageMagick (macports)

or

    sudo fink port install ImageMagick (fink)

After that you can use the convert command to generate image files from every page, your PDF Document contains:

    convert -density 300 file.pdf file.jpg

to get information about the progress, you can add the -monitor switch to the call.