# 2 column pdf on kindle 5 (keeping chapters if possible) ?



## ostap (Oct 29, 2012)

I've spent hours searching and trying different software packages to solve this problem of mine. Maybe you folks will have some advice for me.

My source file is a book of 600 pages in pdf (luckily the selectable-text kind of pdf). main text is two-column text, preface and other parts are one-column. I've tried multiple solutions and mostly what I got was either a pdf of 6000 pages, each being a picture of few text lines, or a huge (700 MB) file. And none of these solutions was able to keep chapter signposts - pretty useful thing in 600 page book if you ask me  Is there maybe a way to select chapters manually in calibre in once converted file?

If you have any advice on this, I'll be glad to hear from you, thanks!

Ostap


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

The only advice I can give is that you might have more success if you try going through an intermediate format first - a Word document for instance.

Copy and paste the text from the PDF into Word, tidy it up as necessary, then mark up the chapter headings as Heading 1, Heading 2 etc.

Save as an rtf, and use caliber to convert the RTF to mobi.

At least this way, you've got a chance to play around with the Word document to adjust things that haven't worked very well.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Hi Ostap.

I'm afraid I am not sure what you're asking?  

If you want to read the PDF file on the Kindle you can do that by just connecting the Kindle to your computer and copying the file to the 'documents' folder of the Kindle. (You can also use the 'send to kindle' applet available on Amazon.) It will remain a PDF file BUT the PDF reader on the kindle is rudimentary, so the searching and stuff might not still be available.  Also, if the original is formatted for a standard sized sheet of paper, well, it's still going to display on a 6" diagonal page so will be correspondingly shrunk to fit.  There are pan and zoom functions, but they're not great.

If, instead, you want to convert it to kindle format, that may be done via any of several 3rd party programs OR send it to the kindle's 'send to' email address via Amazon with the word 'convert' as the subject. (assuming there's no copy protection inherent in the file.)  Conversion this way will render it 'indexable' by the kindle but will remove all specialized formatting.  You may still see bold, italics, etc., but any linking within the document will be gone.  Color will be rendered in gray scale.

Whether there's any further control over the conversion via programs like Calibre I can't answer as I don't use them.


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## ostap (Oct 29, 2012)

Thank you both, Ann and Morf!

I indeed want to convert the pdf file into something that is not treated by kindle as image, but as text - preferably a mobi file. The Word trick works, with several glitches: I am not able to select and copy more than one page at a time in the pdf reader, each line is copied as paragraph of its own and chapter heading gets pasted in Word as the last item in the page. 

Though I didn't think it will be this hard, I'm glad for your assistance


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

I thought there was a way in the Adobe PDF reader to extract the text as a text type document.  The result requires A LOT of clean up, but might be what you need to do.  

Have you tried just sending it via Amazon and see what comes out?


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

Ann is right, in recent versions of Adobe Reader there is a "Save As"..."Text" menu option. This might give you the raw text to import into Word and then format.


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## ostap (Oct 29, 2012)

Found it, thanks! now off to get that huge thing formatted  too bad that each line of text is made into paragraph of its own, but that's probably just the way pdf files are.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

ostap said:


> Found it, thanks! now off to get that huge thing formatted  too bad that each line of text is made into paragraph of its own, but that's probably just the way pdf files are.


If there's any way at all to find the original file wherein the document was composed before it was converted to PDF, you'll get tons better results. Of course, it's possible it was just scanned in which case, yeah, it's basically a bunch of images.


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## ostap (Oct 29, 2012)

The file I have in my hands is text pdf, not bunch of images (luckily). But I guess the way pdf files work is to treat each line of text as paragraph of its own. But I guess I can live with that. 

And trust me, I tried all I could to find azw, mobi, epub, word or any other non-pdf format of the file. so converting from pdf seems to be the only way to go for me.


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

Once you've got everything in Word, you can make use of the search and replace to sort out the line endings.

In File...Options...Display (this is Word 2010, other versions may differ!) turn on "show all formatting marks". You'll then get symbols (paragraph marks, or line breaks) at the end of each line.

In Find/Replace, select "More" and you'll see a "Special" button. You can then pick to replace a paragraph mark (or line break) with a space.

Try this to understand what happens, but then undo the changes and look at the real paragraph breaks. If you're lucky, they will be two paragraph marks, or a line break and a paragraph mark or whatever... anyway, they'll hopefully be different from the end of line.

Using "Special" again, put this sequence in, and replace it with something nonsense ($$%%%$$$ or whatever). Then, replace all the paragraph markers with spaces, and replace the nonsense string with paragraph markers, and voilà, things should be OK! 

Of course, each document is different, so you may have to experiment and try several times, but this feature of Word is great for sorting out line breaks and paragraph breaks that you tend to get with pasted text.

Good luck!


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Morf!  This is genius!

I'd 'converted' a PDF to word a while back -- thinking I could make a better result than Amazon's conversion -- but I had exactly what you describe -- all sorts of extra space lines and it was ridiculous to try to take them all out.  I just gave up.  I may try again with the above trick. . . . . .Thanks!


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## Morf (Nov 18, 2010)

No problem!  

It's something I've done many times in the past, with txt files which usually have a line break at the end of each line which you want to get rid of to re-flow the text.

As I said, it's very much trial and error, but it's certainly a lot easier than manual editing.


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