Ask HN: Need PDF to real reflowable HTML

3 pointsldenoue1 comment

Is there any tool that would let me convert a PDF into a real HTML that reflows on mobile screens while keeping tables, math formulas and figures? The html5 tools out there like Crocodoc and Scribd are "faking" it by positioning each word absolutely using CSS: not working on mobile.

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PDF is a container for several kinds of content ranging from images to simple text. There's no simple direct way of converting arbitrary content to "good" HTML, for example PDF text might be a scanned image not a string of characters. Even a string of characters might contain typographic ligatures and a page of text contain page numbers at the bottom and chapter/section labels at the top and hyphens to break words across lines.

It's probably best to determine how to handle a specific text or group of texts and then do custom conversion.

Good luck.

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