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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[–] fort_burp@feddit.nl 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Cool, thank you very much. I got k2pdf (courtesy of another dope-ass bear) to get the two columns + footnotes in the original pdf into a pdf that is just one column with footnotes clearly distinguishable. Now I need just what you're saying because the result of the k2pdf conversion is an image that I can't select text from (but the words are all in the right order, which is good).

Tesseract seems like a popular choice, I'll give that a try.

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

Tesseract doesn't support PDF input, you'll need some other program like ocrmypdf (which I have used. It uses tesseract), or extract each page to it's own image (which I have also done but I forget how right now.)

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

Thanks again! You're the best :)

This looks like exactly what I need. After getting the formatting right with k2pdf I can then use ocrmypdf to get it back to text form and then just ctrl + a copy to writer and export as epub, since the pdf size is like 15x the epub size.