RubyPDF Blog News PdfMasher is Another Free Software to Convert PDF to MOBI or EPUB

PdfMasher is Another Free Software to Convert PDF to MOBI or EPUB

Calibre is not only a free and open source e-book library management application, but also a power E-book converter, calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats. The full list of formats are as follow,
Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, CHM, DJVU, EPUB, FB2, HTML, HTMLZ, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ
Output Formats: AZW3, EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, HTMLZ, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT, TXTZ

The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book. Many businesses owners also ask us how to monitor employee computers so that their activity can be checked so if you are wondering the same check those out as they are easily the best we have found so far.

but today I will introduce another free and open source software that can easily convert PDF to MOBI or EPUB, it is PdfMasher.

PdfMasher is a tool to convert PDF articles (newspaper, academic) to MOBI or EPUB documents. Most ebook readers support PDF files natively, but it’s often a real pain to read those documents because we don’t have font size control over the document like we have with native ebooks. In many cases, we have to use the zooming feature and it’s just a pain. Another drawback of PDFs on ebook readers is that annotations are not supported.

There are already tools to convert PDFs to ebooks like Calibre, but what they do is that they try to guess the role of each piece of text in the PDF (and that’s if you’re lucky). I think that in all but the simplest cases, it’s a mistake to think that anything short of an AI can do that kind of guessing.

Enter PdfMasher. PdfMasher asks the user about the role of each piece of text, and does it in an efficient manner. Your PDF has a header on each page and you don’t want them to litter your text? Sort text elements by Y-position (thus grouping them all together), shift select the elements and flag them as ignored. They will not appear on your final HTML. Your PDF has footnotes on many pages? Sort your elements by text content (thus grouping all elements with the text starting with a number together) and flag them as footnotes. They will be moved to the end of the document, and PdfMasher will try to create hyperlinks to footnote references.

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