Your best PDF to epub or text software methods?

Historical_General@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 40 points –

I saw this other guy asking how you'd download protected drive only view documents. So that reminded me of that other annoying characteristic of PDFs. They're 'protected'.

How do you deal with PDFs that are inherently uncustomisable and have fixed formatting? I appreciate the KO Reader and other readers can do reflowable text, but I'd prefer not to and epubs/txt/any customisable format would be better.

Any good methods of PDF to text/epub out there?

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In his own words lol:

To re-iterate PDF is a really, really bad format to use as input. If you absolutely must use PDF, then be prepared for an output ranging anywhere from decent to unusable, depending on the input PDF.

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html

Wow who downvotes you?

That quote is pretty spot on. I feel that there might be well formated and simple pdfs which could be formatted but as soon as it gets busier or the pdf isnt well structured behind the scenes it gets messy.

I think some idiots/bots from another instance to do with a political topic did it lol. They've done it to a few comments. We haven't left reddit apparently.

Do you think lemmy admins could see the downvoters and check if they're using bots?

Too many people downvoted your post too idk why

Yeah I noticed that.

I just checked, there are 40 downvotes (78 upvotes). That's wierd - I checked other posts and they don't seem to have anything like that - I saw none in the double digits.

I might just have to keep a separate account for posting politics which is sad but necessary so that my posts/comments are ranked according to utility and not just downvoted by angry nerds. I'll probably make a post about this somewhere too.