this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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How on planet Earth can I change this pdf to epub? I tried everything I could think of in Calibre but the problem is that the pdf has 2 columns of text per page, plus footnotes on each page. When it converts to epub it just prints each line of each text column as a line of text, which makes it totally lose it's meaning. Footnotes are also just added as regular text, as part of a supremely incoherent story with aggressive punctuation.

Has anybody been able to solve this before?

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[–] dead@hexbear.net 7 points 4 days ago

Epub is a zip file with html files inside of it. You can rename epub to zip and extract it with any archive tool.

PDF is a document format.

Book PDFs can contain text or sometimes pictures of text if it is a scanned book. Images of text can be converted into text using OCR software.

If you have like some basic programming knowledge, you could write a script to convert your specific book to the epub style you want.

You could see if the book is already available in epub form on LibGen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis