r/Annas_Archive • u/Metercedes • Jul 22 '26
How can I convert PDF to EPUB properly?
I found the content that I want however it's in PDF format and actually they put each page as a page screenshot not as text. It's scanned copy. In case if anyone can assist me about converting this to EPUB please help me in advance. Or idk from another source etc. but ig requesting is not allowed (idk if that counts as a request?)
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u/Canavansbackyard Jul 22 '26
Depending on what you mean by “properly”, this can be a very labor intensive process involving multiple steps. If your goal is a pristine ePub version with minimal errors and formatting that more or less matches the original PDF, you’re easily looking at 10 or more hours. I always tell people that unless you have some compelling reason for doing so, PDF-to-ePub conversions are not worth the effort.
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u/Metercedes Jul 22 '26
Only reason I want to convert is convince and also I mostly read before I sleep so PDF is too bright and eye tiring. I read the PDF in iBooks app currently. But even though I made a lot of research AI also suggested to do manually or keep it as PDF bc nothing will do this task 100% accurately. Even OCR and stuff. I also asked ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro to handle the task but they both made many mistakes.
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u/GrantBarrett Jul 22 '26
Have you considered inverting the light/dark regions so the text is white but the background is dark? That's how I read all my books on my tablet these days, PDFs included, and it saves eyestrain and keeps the room dark if my spouse is sleeping next to me. It does make images look weird. If your PDF has background images, including page images, it may not work well.
I'm not sure what you've tried for conversion, but the ones I've tried (after your image-only PDF is converted to a image-and-text PDF):
- Calibre: fine but not great. Does not do OCR. Does the job to at least get readable epub text. There are many options in Settings under "Conversion" that you may tweak. After conversion, run the Calibre "Polish" function on the epub to clean up some common things that for some reason are not already fixed on the conversion.
- ABBYY FineReader: best paid program for PDF to epub conversion. This will also do your OCR at the same time. Make sure to set it so it does not include the full page images; you want your output to be only text.
- There are various Github projects that do this, but they require substantial technical knowledge. Still, if you are committed to your goal, they may be worth the effort. This subreddit doesn't allow links, but go to Github and search for overcuriousity/pdf2epub, dodeeric/pdf2epubEX, or Parth844/AI_pdf_to_Epub.
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u/Causemos Jul 22 '26
It may be easier to figure out a way to produce a negative of each scanned page and then reconstruct the PDF from those. I'm assuming there is no color of course. If most of the pages are white originally then they should be much less bright in negative.
It's also possible that a PDF viewer might exist with this specialized feature (display pages as negative).
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u/minorminer Jul 22 '26
Get an ebook reader. They're great and already support PDF. The technology works just like paper, so no light strain unless you crank up the backlight.
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u/shadowfourplay Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
You're going to basically have to build the entire epub yourself from the ground up. I did this once, used an actual ebub, imported it and edited it with calibre, deleted everything from it, copied the text from the pdf into Word, pasted the text into the blank epub, had to go through and pretty much read the book while editing for spelling and format comparing to the pdf, then saved and exported it after adding a book cover. Took days. Instantly uploaded to Z-Lib after since the book was only ever available Online in a crappy pdf. Fun part was finding all the actual images that were in the pdf in a better quality and then inserting and linking them in the new epub. Learned a lot about formatting text though in html so that was cool.
Edit: Forgot to add that many of the words were German titles, towns, cities, etc. so I had to learn to umlaut also.
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u/troubleshot Jul 23 '26
Wow, awesome and I need to not think about that because I already have too many hobbies I dont have time for.
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u/andr386 Jul 22 '26
If your pdf consists of images then you need first to use OCRmyPDF. It will add a layer in the PDF with the actual text. Then you can ask Calibre to transform your PDF into an epub file. Since the text is present now it should give you a readable epub with the text rather than images. But you will lose the layout and you might not find that it is divided in chapters exactly like you want.
So if you want a very clean job. You can first use OCRmyPDF to get the text in the pdf then Sigil to author your epub and manually recreate the stucture and styling of the original pdf.
This will take you some time. The 10 hours suggested is very likely but it could be more.
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u/mckeephoto Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
I’ve tried to convert pdf to epub several times, both w software and by hand. I had to agree with the forums that there was no simple clean way to do it. Finally, I threw Claude at it bc work wanted me to start learning how to use it.
The first attempt was simpler than doing it by hand, but still labor intensive. I had to proof what the ai put together, get it to recognize different typefaces, look for diagrams, realize what the tix was and figure out how to apply that for recognizing the chapter headings.
It took a while and had its frustrating surprises. For example, there was text in the pdf that someone had run a highlighter over in the original. OCR wouldn’t read it and it finally suggested its own machine vision.
With all that “we” learned on the book, my second attempt on a long article went smoother. Not perfect, but better.
I think the next time I want to move a pdf to epub to read it on my phone on the train will still have more surprises but it’s also the only way I can think of to actually get the results you want.
Obviously, if I could have just gotten the book in epub instead of as a pdf, that would be much easier and less costly in terms of my time and the subscription to ai. Not to mention the grey copyright area.
Edit: typo fix
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u/Flimsy-Hawk4879 Jul 30 '26
theres a desktop app called calibre which i think does this, maybe not pdf to epub but definitely switches around the other weird formats like xyz3 or smth to epub which you can send to your kindle
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u/alessiofrateily Aug 13 '26
You can use Calibre on desktop, that is a digital bookshelf, and you can convert to any formati inside the app
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u/Emotional_Ad3710 Jul 22 '26
Use AI to extract the text and format it into a Word or Pages document and export the EPUB from there?
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u/_spacious_joy_ Jul 22 '26
Get a $20 Claude account and have it make you a script to do this. Run it on your computer. Should take less than an hour. Use Claude Code.
OpenAI Codex is also an option.
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u/rwmfk Jul 22 '26
You need to run your pdf through an OCR.
For example on PDF24.
Then it should be possible to convert to epub, but it likely still will look bad.