No .indd files to convert for Kindle publishing

Question

I have been asked to create a Kindle ebook from a PDF document. This ebook will be published on Amazon website officially. I checked on the Kindle website and they had a plugin to convert the file directly into Kindle-compatible format. The issue is that I do not have the original IDD (Adobe Indesign document) which was used for creating it. All I have is the PDF from it.

Is there any way I can create a Kindle ebook from PDF with the proper formatting retained? There will be a table of contents as well. I have tried converting the PDF somehow to RTF and importing in Adobe InDesign, but I still have issues with formatting.

Answer 1

This is going to be a challenge. There are some programs out there that do a decent job extracting text cleanly from PDF files, such as OmniPage. You might also check out pandoc, but you will have to convert the document from PDF to something else before it can help you much. You will almost certainly have to recreate a lot of the formatting, no matter what you do.

It would help us give better answers if you told us what issues you have after converting from PDF to RTF and importing the RTF into InDesign.

Answer 2

Well it depends what is inside of this PDF. It is common that PDF is collection of curves or images instead of text - in that case you cant do much more than just rewrite text of book by hand.

Also PDF can be layered - in hat case order of paragraphs can be messed up and corrections will be needed.

Also you can find a lot of other minor issues like lack of special characters, wrong dashes, white spaces, messed up styling. Making a good ePub from PDF is almost always a time consuming task.

If formatting in PDF is messed up you dint have any convenient tools to quick fix it. You can try some REGEX (not always a good solution) and make corrections by hand.