How to turn an ugly PDF into a pretty Epub

I'm writing this down so a) I don't forget how, and b) so you don't have to spend entire weekends figuring this out.

So the great thing about portable digital readers is that now you can finally go through all those lengthy PDF documents you've downloaded over the years that you didn't want to read through on a glary PC screen. Great, right? Well, here's the crappy news: most readers don't read PDFs. And if they do, they often show it to you in a full-page mode with no zoom capabilities, which renders it pretty pointless.

Readers like the Sony Reader line do zooming pretty well, but even then, it's no match for some more difficult PDF files.

Now, this tutorial won't really work well with PDFs with images, but it might! I'm just not guaranteeing it, since images are a wild card in the epub game and results may vary.

1) attain some kind of PDF file. If you're like me, there's about a dozen of them in your download folder that you meant to open but never did.

2) Open this PDF in a program that will allow you to save the file as HTML. Do so.

3) Open the HTML file. Copy everything into a textedit or wordpad file. Save it as rich-text.

4) Open Calibre (you do have Calibre, right?) Convert the file to epub. You're done!

This process fixes one of the most annoying things PDFs do: force-wrap text. If you were to just copy the text from the PDF to the textedit box, you'd end up with a lot of this:

This process fixes one of the most annoying things PDFs do:

force-wrap text. If you were to just

copy the text from the PDF to the textedit

box, you'd end up with a lot of this:

It reads a lot better the first way, right? EPUB files wrap really well against any kind of screen, so you want that capability in there.