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I have an extensive library of heavily formatted PDFs which I'd like to convert. I've tried Calibre on Windows and GNU/Linux, but it throws a few errors and bails.

Can someone recommend software for Win/Linux that yields good conversions in batch mode? I have over 10,000 volumes, so converting each by hand is impossible.

Thanks :)

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3 Answers 3

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I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to stick with PDF but I recently just converted over 1T of EPUBS & MOBIs to PDF as I use Adobe Acrobat X Pro on a daily basis both personally, academically and professionally.

AniceSoft worked beautifully keeping everything as they should be and as it allowed me to set the margin size output for the final PDF. It will convert your files to EPUBS or whatever files you want. It is also capable of 100 files per batch and converts quite rapidly, especially when compared to Calibre which I had initially tried and found I could single convert quicker using Online-Convert (which is my go-to single converter for both work and pleasure). I was able to complete all of the conversions before the trial ran out.

As for DJVU, I found Online-Convert to do the best work and I use a 2cm border when I convert anything to PDF.

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  • I have to agree with @idiiotprogrammer that the rationale for this conversion is, at best, unstated.
    – Thufir
    Commented Dec 19, 2018 at 17:51
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I'm going to push back on your question a bit -- why would you want to convert from PDF to epub?

Both are rendered formats, and their rendering is specific to the tool used to render them. PDF's by their very nature are made in order to be printed according to a specific dimension.

I'm guessing that you want to do backend processing for a website or business that has legacy PDFs. Perhaps you want to redistribute the files to a more mobile-friendly format?

Now that tablets of 9 inch and higher are popular, it is fairly easy to use a PDF viewer app to read almost any pdf tolerably well. Why not just treat PDF as an end format for viewing -- and not worry about imperfect conversions?

A person with an android could potentially upload all these pdfs to Google Play Books and have a high quality way to read all the pdfs.

I am guessing that you have already googled for batch conversion from pdf to epub. (see also this: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-free-PDF-to-EPUB-converter ) (Flawed) Solutions certainly exist, but I am having trouble understanding the business need.

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  • My e-book reader does not render PDFs as correctly as djvu/mobi/epub. It is very simple. I have considered postscript, but really the best option is now to drop each page into JPG, and write a perl script to build each epub (zipped HTML) from those image files. It would be an awful solution, and SE is my last resort.
    – user400344
    Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 19:06
  • The converter programs will probably only do as well as your ebook reader does the conversion and probably worse
    – mmmmmm
    Commented Dec 10, 2016 at 11:03
  • If your goal is to reduce the size of the files, I don't think converting will necessarily help you. I think it's easier to find a device which reads pdf files admirably than to try to get a bulk solution that works well enough. By the way, I forgot to mention that on android Adobe Digital Editions for android reads stuff from memory cards pretty easily. So do several others PDF reading apps.
    – idiotprogrammer
    Commented Dec 12, 2016 at 0:34
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Since you've mentioned that you have an e-reader, you could install KOReader, which has a dynamic PDF page reflow feature, on Kobo, Pocketbook and Kindle e-readers or reformat all pdf files for 6" screens with Willus.com's K2pdfopt. (The PDF reflow feature of KOReader is based on K2pdfopt.)

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  • These options look promising. I'll leave the question open a bit longer before marking the question as answered.
    – user400344
    Commented Dec 10, 2016 at 7:29

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