this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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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
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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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[–] techpeakedin1991@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago

Like others have said, you probably have to do it manually. If the pdf has a lot of pages though, and they're all in a similar format, it might be easier to script it using something like https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber