[Buddha-l] buddha-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 16

[Bernard Simon]

On Mar 19, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Christopher Fynn wrote:

>> You can't make an e-book from a pdf. The pdf formatting is too low  
>> level.
>> Typically you would have a Word (.doc) file and make the pdf,  
>> kindle, and
>> epub file from it, which is how Smashword is set up.
>
> http://www.pdftoepub.com/
> http://www.pdftokindle.com/

Well, yes, you can turn a pdf into an e-book, and I've done it myself.  
What I should have said is that the result is not acceptable, at least  
to me. The problem is that pdf format is too low level.The  
instructions in a pdf file are at the level of where to place each  
character on the page. Any higher level semantics, like organization  
into paragraphs and chapters is lost. You can try to guess at the  
structure using heuristics, but the results aren't very satisfactory.

Which is why starting with a word processing file is a much better way  
of creating e-books, if the document was competently created using  
styles.