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March 08, 2022 Post a Comment

Many ebook readers natively support PDF documents but, unfortunately, not all PDF documents are easy to read on a pocket-size ebook reader screen. Let's take a look at two simple and free ways to convert PDF files for enjoyable reading.

Kindles, Nooks, Sony Pocket Readers, and other popular readers support native PDF rendering. The problem with native rendering, however, is that many PDF documents are formatted to exist read on a big screen or printed and read in hard re-create. Big margins, multiple columns, and other formatting choices that aren't such a large deal when the document in printed on 8.five×eleven paper or displayed on a 20″ monitor render the certificate virtually unreadable when loaded into an east-reader with a 6″ screen. Today we're going to look at two ways you can re-format a PDF file for enjoyable reading on your favorite reader.

What You'll Need

For our tutorial you'll need the following things:

A copy of ebook management software Calibre.
A re-create of K2pdfopt.
A PDF file to convert.
An e-reader to try the file out on.

We advise keep a clean copy of your PDF test file in a separate directory then if all your conversion attempts go awry you'll have the original condom and audio.

Converting Using Calibre

Calibre is an awesome and open source ebook management tool. If you've read this far and take no intention of even mucking around with whatsoever PDF files you should get and download information technology regardless. It'south a fantastic tool for managing ebooks and ebook readers. What we're interested in, book management aside, is the conversion tool built into Calibre.

If you're totally new to using Calibre and need assistance installing it and getting your books into information technology, check out i of our previous Calibre-based guides to get started. Once yous've installed information technology and you lot've loaded up a book y'all want to catechumen it's time to get converting.

For our case nosotros'll be using a particularly circuitous textbook (multiple columns, charts, graphic headers for each chapter, etc.) and a Kindle. First let's look at what the original PDF file looks like on the Kindle screen.

That's middle-squintingly small on a large monitor screen and nearly illegible on a Kindle screen. There'south no way we could comfortable read that on a 6″ kindle screen without serious eye strain and a headache. Let's see if we can catechumen it with Calibre.

Open Calibre and right click on the book. Select Convert Books –> Convert individually. Hither you'll find an enormously detailed carte du jour with toggles and settings galore. It's easy to get overwhelmed and some of the settings are pretty arcane if you're unfamiliar with printing terms and/or search string expressions. For the outset conversion stick with the default settings and convert betwixt PDF and a suitable format for your ebook reader or even PDF to PDF to restructure multi-column PDF files into a more streamlined document.

When information technology's done converting you can check the formatting on your computer by double clicking on the converted file in the right hand book information column or you can transfer it to your device. We transferred it to the device to get a existent sense of how it looked on the folio.

Although nosotros've used Calibre to convert hundreds of ebooks over the final few years with very few issues this particular PDF file proved to be a real challenge for information technology. The multiple columns, odd formatting choices, and other factors really stumped Calibre.

While Calibre ordinarily does a fine job converting PDF files we picked i of the most hard to convert PDFs we had on hand to demonstrate that things don't ever get as planned. Nosotros also picked a really difficult to catechumen PDF so that we could in turn show off the next tool in our tutorial, K2pdfopt. It'due south like the nuclear option when the normally reliable Calibre fails to crank out a working conversion. If you observe yourself in a similar boat, your complex PDF document didn't plow out correct, yous'll likely be thrilled with K2pdfopt.

Converting Optimizing PDF files using K2pdfopt

Get-go, we want to give a big cheers to Abhijeet at Guiding Tech; nosotros'd been looking for a tool like this and he tipped united states of america off at merely the right time. K2pdfopt is designed to optimize PDF documents for small screen due east-readers. Rather than convert the certificate into raw text and try to reformat it, it instead carefully crops and realigns the pieces as though they were a series of images. The end result is a new PDF file that is really truthful to the original document and free from odd OCR blunders (as it doesn't effort to convert or reflow the text).

Using K2pdfopt is a snap. Extract the executable into a folder, drag a PDF file onto the EXE and permit it work—every bit seen in the screenshot above. Nosotros dropped the aforementioned difficult to format textbook PDF into K2pdfopt and crossed our fingers. Given how much Calibre struggled with the certificate we weren't certain what to expect. When the conversion completed (y'all'll come across a re-create of your PDF file with the file named annotated like filename_k2opt.pdf in the K2pdfopt folder) we copied it over to our Kindle and were shocked at how well it handled the complex text we threw at it.

The text is slightly less crisp than in our PDF to MOBI conversion (meet the screen capture in the Calibre section) but it is all there, with proper formatting, and without any screwy OCR errors. Cheers to K2pdfopt nosotros went from having a PDF that was illegible on the Kindle to having a PDF that was equally like shooting fish in a barrel to read as a make clean photocopy.

The only downside we could find in using K2pdfopt was the increase in file size. A 15MB PDF file, when converted with K2pdfopt, ballooned to 93MB. When you consider how few conversions Calibre doesn't properly handle and how few books we'd demand to really send through the K2pdfopt epitome-based conversion process, though, it's not a bad merchandise off. We can stand to increase the file size on a few PDFs in order to gain admission to a portable and hands read copy.

Update: Shortly after this commodity went live on the site Marcus wrote in and asked

What if you took the K2pdfopt.exe output and ran the resulting PDF through Calibre again to convert it to a MOBI or ePUB? Maybe that would stop Calibre from choking on the multi-column format since it would now be formatted more like a standard book. Could y'all guys try it out?

What if, Marcus? What if, indeed. We dove in deeper, Inception-style, and performed a test just as you lot requested. Calibre handled the conversion beautifully and the text cleaned up perfectly. How perfectly? Here'southward a snippet of the text seen in the screenshot above (which is properly formatted but a little grainy) later on the reconversion process:

And there yous accept it. For a particularly tricky PDF file y'all can run it through K2pdfopt.exe, then dump information technology back into Calibre for a cleanup laissez passer (check out how polish the font is now in the higher up sample), and enjoy a totally optimized PDF. Good call, Marcus! The extra step only adds a few minutes to the procedure and really tidies things upward.

Take a conversion tip, flim-flam, or tool to share? We're interested to hear about it so shoot us an email at tips@howtogeek.com or sound off well-nigh it in the comments here.