PDF TO EPUB

• Jun 25, 2023 - 01:43

I perform and teach guitar. I just self-published a guitar method book in paperback. Naturally it has text, photos, and sheet music in standard notation. I want to make an Ebook. I was told I have to convert the paperback PDF to an Epub file. But the company that published my paperback says they will not convert a PDF containing sheet music to Epub because it doesn’t come out good. I was really hoping to have an Ebook of this. Is there any way of doing that such that it is a viable Ebook? I know nothing about tech anything, so my question is: can it be done if I pay someone to do it for me.


Comments

Does the company that published your book own the copyright? If so, there's that to consider. Also there are plenty of PDF to Epub sites. Google it.

In reply to by bobjp

Thanks for your reply. I own the copyright, so that’s not a problem. And yes, there are lots of conversion sites, even some free ones, and Zamzar Conversion gets great reviews. But my question still is: Can a PDF with sheet music, photos, and text, be converted to Epub successfully to fully function properly as an Ebook?

In reply to by bobjp

Thanks for your reply. I own the copyright, so that’s not a problem. And yes, there are lots of conversion sites, even some free ones, and Zamzar Conversion gets great reviews. But my question still is: Can a PDF with sheet music, photos, and text, be converted to Epub successfully to fully function properly as an Ebook?

In reply to by gitterist

You could try calibre. It is a well established and comprehensive eBook management system that includes format conversion and an eBook editor. (And it is totally free software that you install - just like Musescore).

https://calibre-ebook.com/

You can learn more or ask questions at the calibre section of MobileRead. So you could try a conversion and ask for advice if it needs improving.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166

There is a thread specifically about PDF conversion:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=118605

Is PDF the only electronic format that you have for your book?

In reply to by yonah_ag

Thanks for your reply. I can’t do anything that involves tech anything. And in the article you cited, it sounds like PDF to Epub simply doesn’t work, especially with sheet music, which is what the publisher said. I could probably have the PDF converted to WORD, and assuming that that conversion comes out really good, then possibly have the WORD doc converted to Epub. There must be a way. The book is a method book for classical guitar. Classical guitar music is written all in treble clef, so it’s at least a little less complex and less dense. I see plenty of Ebooks on classical guitar methods, and they all obviously have the same as mine – sheet music, photos, and text. So they all had to have been converted from some kind of file to Epub. And if for example they were originally made in WORD and then converted to Epub, that might not necessarily be the same as using a WORD doc that was itself an already converted file.

typically, a book is created in a typesetting program (my mom typeset books for 40 years in SGML on a Mac and they were mostly education and technical books so text, diagrams, formulas, etc), so i suggest finding out if the company which published the paperback has the source typesetting document(s). if that source could be exported into a publication ready format (such as Word), then converting that into an EPUB file should be straightforward. in general PDF into Word or other formats requires extensive work to "fix" as PDF line breaks are hard breaks and not flowed.

"I just self-published a guitar method book in paperback."
In what program did you create it? Musescore and export to PDF?

The nature of epubs is that text usually can flow and be resized. Your music notation certainly will be fixed aspect ratio images. I suppose you can create an epub out of your PDF in the way that each page will just be an image.
Or you rewrite it in LibreOffice or Word as text (which then can flow) and with the music notation as images.
This might be interesting to read and is about creating an epub (with embedded audio snippets):
http://jonathankulp.org/goetschius_rationale.html

Hi - just wondering if you found a way to do this ... ?
I have a 'supplement' for a music ed book I published several years ago, MuseScore files converted to PDF.
I tried a couple of the free online converters a little while ago, no luck.
Thanks for any clues :-)
DS

In reply to by DS-GBT

I have had a look and it can't be fully achieved via a MuseScore plugin because there is no zip file management in the plugin API. I have written plugins for calibre in the past, (in python), but these have access to the full calibre code so almost everything is possible.

You could either use calibre to assemble the images into an ePub or you could probably use 7zip to do the packaging after a MuseScore plugin has done as much as it can, i.e. the book would be prepared but not zipped. (I don't think that the built-in zip capability of Windows would be sufficient because at least 1 of the ePub files has to be packaged into the ePub without compression).

In reply to by DS-GBT

You would need the pages as .PNG images to use this calibre method.

You can explore the structure of the ePub file by changing the extension to .zip. You will see what a simple structure it is and why I thought that a plugin could build one. There is only 1 critical element and that is the mimetype file which must be the first file in the zip archive and must be uncompressed and unencrypted.

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