this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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How on planet Earth can I change this pdf to epub? I tried everything I could think of in Calibre but the problem is that the pdf has 2 columns of text per page, plus footnotes on each page. When it converts to epub it just prints each line of each text column as a line of text, which makes it totally lose it's meaning. Footnotes are also just added as regular text, as part of a supremely incoherent story with aggressive punctuation.

Has anybody been able to solve this before?

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[–] Edie@hexbear.net 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

PDFs are styling with text. The footnotes are usually just plain text, with no connection, no different from the rest of the text—unlike in EPUBs where they are usually connected through anchors, bonus if they have epub:type, and the footnote text is usually away from the rest of the chapter text. AFAIK there is no good way of automatically converting from PDF to EPUB. So to answer the question in the title, manually.


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[–] fort_burp@feddit.nl 7 points 2 weeks ago

Bah, thanks. It's so annoying bc highlighting the page and doing copy paste also mixes the text of the two columns.