this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
39 points (100.0% liked)

askchapo

23192 readers
98 users here now

Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.

Rules:

  1. Posts must ask a question.

  2. If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.

  3. Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.

  4. Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net
replaceable@hexbear.net
VILenin@hexbear.net
SexUnderSocialism@hexbear.net
khizuo@hexbear.net
Wakmrow@hexbear.net
39
You seem like the kind of people that read. How do you convert to epub? (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 weeks ago by fort_burp@feddit.nl to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

ePUB is basically zipped HTML, so while it's easy to convert from, it's hard to convert to. You might just want to try to find your book in an alternative format from somewhere like Annas Archive. I think azw3 and mobi's can be converted to ePUB easier.

Really the only good way is to manually recreate the book, there's no good automatic pdf to epub converter. You might be able to hire a guy on fiverr or such to do it for you, that's the closest I can think of to automatic.