Some trouble with Calibre

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querocomprartudoisso
Posts: 3
Joined: 13 Jul 2012, 18:12
E-book readers owned: Mounting a Homer Scanner
Number of books owned: 6
Country: Brazil

Some trouble with Calibre

Post by querocomprartudoisso »

Does anybody here uses Calibre? I assumed it was the first thing everybody thinks of when it comes with e-books, but I guess I was wrong, so if you want to answer this question with a suggestion of other softwares to use, you're welcome too.
Well, my issue is that Calibre seems to be aimed exclusively to tablets, cell phones and e-book readers in general, but I usually like to read them at home and work PC's with large screens, and, sometimes, I print them. So I would like to convert the e-books to A4 scale (so they are better in the screen and much better for printing), but the "input" and "output" screens of the convertion wizard only have lots os options related to portable devices, and that leads to small pages with big letters, and the books get about 10 times the number of pages they should have.
Do you have any idea of what options I have to overcome this dificulty?
Also, when it comes to the books that are related to my job, there are some of them I whould need to edit. I'm ok with transforming e-books in EPUB format to RTF, but when it comes to scanned books (in PDF), I'm having problems with the fact that the PDF's have 2 layers (according to what I've read): one with the image of each page, and other with the text. When I try to convert from PDF to RTF, only the image is sent. Do you know why? The "save as text" that every single PDF reader (including adobe's) has is useless, since it breaks every single line, and that makes it impossible to have the text justified (and that's exactly what I'm trying to overcome).
I've tried to find these answers in other places, but Calibre documentation is poor about that.
Thanks.
revjoe
Posts: 22
Joined: 17 Jan 2011, 15:31

Re: Some trouble with Calibre

Post by revjoe »

Couple of thoughts:

Calibre is certainly focused on ebook reading and not printing, but the epub formats are simply zipped html files. You could rename them with the .zip extension and open them using your favorite browser to print them that way, but I am not sure how clean a print you would get. You could also open them in Adobe InDesign if you have a copy laying about. Then you would have real control over the layouts, but I am not sure that it would not still require some adjustments to get right.

You might check over at the mobiread forums for calibre to see if there is any way to reformat the epubs for printing http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. I often find the forums better than the documentation for finding obscure stuff.

As for printing PDF's. I would try to avoid reformatting them if you can. Perhaps the "shrink to fit" option in your printer driver can adjust to A4 for you? If you do decide to change their format, there will undoubtedly be a lot of cleanup involved after the conversion. You will either end up cleaning up the OCR, or cleaning up the formatting of the text. With some PDF's I have had better success printing the PDF to and image format, then running the PDF through and OCR engine to get the text, then using Sigil to create the epub format. But that will largely depend on the quality of the scans.

Good luck, and let us know what you find.

Joe
AndiPersti
Posts: 1
Joined: 21 Jul 2011, 08:20
Number of books owned: 0

Re: Some trouble with Calibre

Post by AndiPersti »

Calibre is mainly used for managing an ebook-collection and for converting between different formats.
As you probably know, it also includes an ebook-viewer, from which you can print the ebook (you don't need to convert the ebook). Usually ebooks don't specify absolute font sizes, only relative ones (like webpages). Thus if you set the printing format to A4, you should be ok.

Converting pdf to epub (or any other text format) is generally not easy, because pdf is a format intended for final consumption and you should regard it more as an image format than a text format. Thus editing the content is mostly next to impossible. If you are lucky, you are able to get the raw text without formatting. But sometimes a pdf-file is just a collection of pictures and therefore much more work is necessary (OCR, proofreading, formatting, ...).
querocomprartudoisso
Posts: 3
Joined: 13 Jul 2012, 18:12
E-book readers owned: Mounting a Homer Scanner
Number of books owned: 6
Country: Brazil

Re: Some trouble with Calibre

Post by querocomprartudoisso »

That's sad. You both mean that, for now, I don't really have options.
The idea of printing without reformat whould make the letters much bigger than what we are used to. I'll try my hope that, in the case of EPUB (PDF is really not for it), the letters really don't have absolute sizes. So that may solve half of the problem. Even though, it's sad, because 100% of the OCR I learnt to make end up in PDF format. So if I scan in C5 and want to print in A4, I'll have big letters. And if I want to edit it, I'll have the every-line-breaks problem.
I'll take some time to look for Sigil, the forum mentioned, and also try something like Acrobat X.
Thanks for your advise.
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