this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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askchapo

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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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[โ€“] Edie@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I tried https://redstarpublishers.org/adoratsky.pdf in the one you shared. It's good compared to all the PDF converts I've seen. And if I had to read it without making any changes to it, it'll certainly do. But it could use some manual intervention. There are random line breaks, blockquotes are not blockquotes, and footnotes are just... in the text. That's at least what I see at a glance.

Edit: Wait, hang on, cloudconvert is just using Calibre! It's the exact same output. Every css class is calibre[number]. And stuff like the OPF contain metadata with calibre: <dc:contributor opf:role="bkp">calibre (8.4.0) [https://calibre-ebook.com/]</dc:contributor>

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