Feature support varies across devices and applications, with some features such as audio and video support dependent on device support. The format is mainly comprised of styled (CSS2) text and may include inline raster or vector images. What is EPUB?ĮPUB (short for Electronic PUBlication), is a file type for reflowable content aimed at being consumed on handheld devices such as mobile phones and e-readers. In most PDF viewers the blue text can still be selected even though it’s behind the red rectangle. This method is often wrongly used to ‘delete’ sensitive information from a document. The process is additive, so drawing a line of blue text followed by a red rectangle that covers the text may obscure the blue text, but it still exists within the document. PDF files contain a stream of commands such as ‘draw text’, ‘draw image’, ‘draw line’, ‘draw curve’, ‘draw rectangle’, ‘fill shape’, ‘clip shape’, etc. A human can infer which bits of text are headings, which lines combine into paragraphs, and how the text interacts with the rest of the content on the page, but that type of information is not actually contained within the document. font face, text size, color), then a new text draw command is required.

When a new line occurs or any other properties change (e.g. In PDF, the text is drawn one line at a time. It would be more accurate to describe PDF as a vector graphic format with support for text elements. Contrary to its name, however, PDF files are more like vector images than rich-text documents. PDF is an initialism for ‘Portable Document Format’. To start with, it’s helpful to understand the differences between the PDF and EPUB file formats. The long answer is that it depends – here’s why. So what we’re really being asked is if fixed-layout PDF content can be made responsive. The main problem with this task is that PDF is a fixed-layout file format, whilst EPUB is generally intended to be reflowable. 4 Reasons why Converting PDF to Responsive EPUB is ImpossibleĪs the developers of a PDF to HTML5 Conversion tool ( BuildVu), one of the topics we are regularly asked about is converting PDF to EPUB.

He oversees the BuildVu product strategy and roadmap in addition to spending lots of time writing code. Leon Atherton Leon is a developer at IDRsolutions and product manager for BuildVu.

Converting pdf to epub files