PDF to EPUB
Convert text PDFs into a reflowable EPUB/HTML ebook
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Convert a text PDF to reflowable EPUB or HTML, detecting headings by font size
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About PDF to EPUB
A PDF fixes every character to a position on a page, which is why reading one on a phone means pinching and panning. An EPUB stores paragraphs and lets the reading app re-break lines for the screen width and font size. This tool pulls the text out of a PDF, regroups it into headings, paragraphs and lists, and writes the result as an EPUB or a single HTML file. How text is actually placed inside a PDF is covered in the guide “How PDF Files Work”.
It needs a PDF with a text layer; scans must go through OCR first. Images such as photos and charts are not carried over — the cover page gets a short note saying they were left out.
How pages are turned back into paragraphs
Characters are grouped into lines, multi-column pages are put into reading order, and paragraphs are split on line spacing and indentation. Running headers and footers — page numbers and the document title repeated on every page — are dropped. Without that step the e-book would be peppered with stray lines like “23” or “Chapter 2 Market Analysis”.
A short block (up to three lines and 160 characters) set at least 15 % larger than the document’s body size is treated as a heading. When there are several heading sizes, the largest becomes h2, the next h3, and so on. A subheading that is only bold, at body size, is not detected as a heading.
What the EPUB looks like
The output is a minimal EPUB 3: a cover page plus one body file. Headings are marked up inside the body, so they appear larger, but the reader’s table-of-contents menu lists only two entries — the cover and the book title. If you want to jump chapter by chapter, download the HTML, tidy it, and split chapters in an e-book editor such as Calibre.
Page boundaries are removed, but a paragraph that breaks across a page can come through as two paragraphs. Footnotes stay where they sat on the page, so they appear inside the running text.
Worked examples
A report with 10 pt body, 18 pt chapter and 13 pt section headings
- Input
40-page report with page number and report name in every footer- Output
EPUB: cover + one body file; 18 pt lines as h2, 13 pt lines as h3
13 pt is 1.3 × the 10 pt body, above the 1.15 × threshold, so it counts as a heading; ranked by size, 18 pt sits one level higher. The repeated page numbers and report name are recognised as footers and removed. Bold 10 pt subheadings would stay ordinary paragraphs.
How to use it
- Open a text-based PDF.
- Enter a title and author (optional) and choose EPUB or HTML.
- Convert, download, and check the heading levels in an e-reader or browser.
Frequently asked questions
Will it open on a Kindle?
Send to Kindle accepts EPUB and converts it. Because this EPUB has only two table-of-contents entries, that’s all the Kindle’s contents menu will show.
What happens to tables?
Table structure isn’t rebuilt. Cell text comes out as line-by-line paragraphs, so table-heavy documents are a poor fit.
EPUB or HTML?
EPUB if you just want to read it. HTML if you plan to fix headings or split chapters. The HTML version also switches to a dark background when your system uses dark mode.
Sources
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